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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
COPY. 

ESSAYS FROM AN EDITOR'S DRAWER 

ON 

RELIGION, LITERATURE, AND LIFE. 

THIRD EDITION. 

12mo, Cloth binding. Price $1.50. 

THOMAS WHITTAKER, PUBLISHER, 
NEW YORK 



m 

Wbz SStsfjop ^aaliock lectures for 1888 



The World and the 
Kingdom 

BY 

HUGH MILLER THOMPSON 

BISHOP OF MISSISSIPPI 




NEW YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 
1888 




RAND AVERY COMPANY, BOSTON, 
MADE THIS BOOK. 



THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES. 



In the summer of the year 1880, George A. 
Jarvis of Brooklyn, N.Y., moved by his sense of 
the great good which might thereby accrue to 
the cause of Christ, and to the Church of which 
he was an ever-grateful member, gave to the 
General Theological Seminary of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church certain securities, exceeding 
in value eleven thousand dollars, for the founda- 
tion and maintenance of a Lectureship in said 
seminary. 

Out of love to a former pastor and enduring 
friend, the Right Rev. Benjamin Henry Paddock, 
D.D., Bishop of Massachusetts, he named the 
foundation " The Bishop Paddock Lecture- 
ship." 

The deed of trust declares that, — 

"The subjects of the lectures shall be such as appertain 
to the defence of the religion of Jesus Christ, as revealed 



6 THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES. 

in the Holy Bible, and illustrated in the Book of Common 
Prayer, against the varying errors of the day, whether 
materialistic, rationalistic, or professedly religious, and 
also to its defence and confirmation in respect of such 
central truths as the Trinity, the Atonement, Justification, 
and the Inspiration of the Word of God ; and of such 
central facts as the Church's Divine Order and Sacra- 
ments, her historical Reformation, and her rights and 
powers as a pure and national Church. And other sub- 
jects may be chosen if unanimously approved by the 
Board of Appointment as being both timely and also 
within the true intent of this Lectureship." 

Under the appointment of the board created by 
the trust, the Right Rev. Hugh Miller Thompson, 
D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Mississippi, delivered the 
Lectures for the year 1888, contained in this 
volume. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



These Lectures are printed because the conditions 
upon which they were prepared and delivered demand 
it, and also because the writer hopes they may be 
found suggestive, and stimulating (whether of agreeing 
or opposing thought is no matter), to those for whom 
the Lectures on this Foundation are primarily intended 
— students and the younger clergy. 

H. M. T. 

New York, Lent, 1888. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE PAGE 

I. The Law of Growth n 

II. The Struggle for the Mastery ... 37 

III. The Step-Child of Time 67 

IV. The Child in the Manger 93 

V. The Seed growing secretly . . . . 123 



LECTURE I. 
THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



Then said he, Unto what is the kingdom of God like ? and where- 
unto shall I resemble it ? 

It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into 
his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the 
air lodged in the branches of it. 

And again he said, Whereimto shall I liken the kingdom of God? 

It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures 
of meal, till the whole was leavened. 

St. Luke xiii. 18-21. 



THE WORLD AND THE KINGDOM. 



LECTURE I. 
THE LAW OF GROWTH. 

IF God is to give a revelation of Divine knowl- 
edge to man, it must be given, being what man 
is, under limitations. 

First, it must be given in human speech. There 
is, therefore, the Divine essence — the revelation ; 
and the human clothing of the revelation — human 
words. 

The Divine essence is always the same. The 
human expression must necessarily vary. Also, 
the human expression may be inadequate, or even 
erroneous. 

The Old Testament revelation was given in 
Hebrew words, the New in Greek. The prophet 
or the evangelist used his own language, and his 
own style in that language, to express the eternal 
verities revealed in his spirit by the Holy Ghost. 

*3 



14 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



The doctrine of a verbal inspiration was never 
that of the Church Catholic. It would involve us 
in this difficulty, — that, if words be an essential 
of the revelation, then the millions upon millions 
of Christian men have never read nor heard the 
revelation. The great translations — the Sep- 
tuagint, the Latin Vulgate, Luther's German 
Bible, and the noblest translation of them all, 
the English version of King James — are, on 
that theory, not the revelation of God ; and only 
here and there a rare scholar, in all the Christian 
centuries, has been able to read the written Word 
of God in the original Hebrew or Greek. 

We accept this condition, then. We have the 
revelation in earthen vessels. The Divine 
thoughts are clothed in the speech of men, for 
the uses of men. So only does God reach men, 
by speaking in -their own poor finite speech, as a 
mother speaks child-talk to her nursling. 

And the human speech is always, perhaps, in- 
adequate, except to express the infinite love and 
tenderness. All human speech is inadequate. 
The loftiest words of prophet or psalmist sound 
like broken words. They stumble and stagger 
and groan, as it were, under the burdens of the 
infinite meaning they bear. 

Theological controversies have generally been 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



about the words, the human covering of the 
Divine revelation. So have come the bitterness, 
the wrath, and the divisions. "The letter kill- 
eth, the spirit giveth life." Our Lord drew the 
distinction clearly between the Divine essential 
of the revelation, and the poor, small, human, 
finite words in which of necessity, to reach men, 
the revelation must be clothed. 

But not only, under the conditions, must a reve- 
lation be made in human speech, and be capable 
of being put into any form of human speech, 
existing at the time, or afterwards to exist ; but 
it must be made according to the way of human 
thinking at the time, and among the people, 
when it is given, and be capable of translation 
into the way of thinking and the way of looking 
at things among people in any age, and of any 
race, to the end of time. Else it fails of being 
understood. 

The English language contains, we believe, the 
revelation made in Holy Scripture, adequately, 
completely. So does the German, the French, 
the Spanish. Yet these languages did not exist 
when the Holy Scriptures were written. No man 
doubts but that any human speech, now existing 
or hereafter to arise, will be competent to express 
all things necessary to man's salvation. 



1 6 THE LAW OF GROWTH, 

The language'itself may even need conversion 
to Christianity, as St. Jerome converted the Latin, 
which by nature knew no Christ, no Saviour, and 
no repentance. But as Latin was converted, every 
tongue may be. All are capable of conversion, 
as the men who speak them are. 

So the way of thinking, of looking at things, 
of considering man and the world, the past and 
the future, the beginning and the end, the mean- 
ing and the purpose, — what we may call philos- 
ophy, — will be always capable of receiving and 
conveying and illustrating the truth of revelation. 

This way of thinking, or philosophy, varies as 
language does, among different people and in 
different ages. It may be as strange and for- 
eign in some cases as a dead or foreign speech : 
nevertheless, the Divine revelation will fit to what- 
ever truth there is in it, will submit to its meth- 
ods, walk upon its lines, and find itself in accord 
and sympathy with whatever is real, genuine, and 
human in it. 

At the time when our Lord was on the earth, 
there is no question that the way of looking at 
things, — the philosophy, so called, — among 
thinking and educated . people, was a more or 
less modified Platonism. 

The great Greek had influenced all serious- 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



17 



minded men. I have no fear in saying that the 
New Testament may be truthfully called in sjme 
respects Platonic. I have no timid concern to 
explain away the fact that St. Paul's anthropology 
— his way of looking at man and his nature as 
three and not two, as body, soul, and spirit — is 
distinctly Platonic, as a philosophy. I am not 
concerned, either, to explain away the still more 
startling fact, that St. John in his Gospel uses a 
Platonic word to express an awful Christian mys- 
tery ; and that the Holy Spirit through him names 
the Jewish Jehovah by the Greek and Platonic 
word Logos, and lifts it so to heights of which 
philosophy never dreamed. 

I say I am not afraid nor concerned ; because 
with the elder Greek fathers, and, as I believe, 
with St. John and St. Paul, I am fain to think that 
all wisdom comes from God, all deep, true, rever- 
ent, lofty thinking rises through the dark to the 
light eternal, and that from the seven lamps before 
His awful throne faint gleams fall upon all souls 
who are humbly trying to grope their way along 
those world's altar-stairs 

" That slope through darkness up to God." 

The truth in human thinking and the truth in 
God's revealing must be the same truth. The 



i8 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



eternal Teacher of St. Clement of Alexandria, who 
teaches Moses, teaches Socrates also, and is not 
only the Logos of St. John, but the Phos, — " the 
true Light that lighteth every man who comes 
into the world." 

One needs not only to remember that theologi- 
cal controversies have been, I might say largely, 
not about the essence — the Divine part — of the 
revelation, but about its finite human expression ; 
but also, when they have not been about the words, 
that they have centred around the philosophy, 
" the way of looking at things," that is. 

It is no exaggeration to say that half the con- 
troversies about the deepest mysteries of the faith 
have been really controversies between idealism 
and sensitism, realism and nominalism, Plato and 
Aristotle the masters. 

Yet both these find their place, and both have 
done theology high service. 

As a modern writer of somewhat shallow books 
has somewhat dramatically shown, the Christian 
Church after many centuries utilized a heathen 
philosopher's physical theory to explain the doc- 
trine of the eucharist, — Aristotle's theory of 
substance and accidents, that is, to explain and 
justify the new doctrine of transubstantiation in 
the twelfth century. 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



I 9 



Aristotle's physical theory has met the common 
fate of physical theories, and has fallen childish 
now ; but the metaphysics, " the way of looking at 
things," the philosophy as I call it, is independent 
of his physics ; and Platonism and Aristotelianism, 
realism and nominalism, have been at the base of 
all theological controversies since the fourth cen- 
tury, and lie at the base of all such now, that have 
any thinking or any philosophy at all. 

That is, both ways of thinking — any reasonable, 
reverent, serious way of considering mortal life at 
all — find the revelation capable of talking their 
language and going their way. 

Truthful, earnest, human thinking, that is, 
strikes an accordant note with the Divine thought 
in revelation. Man is made in the image of God ; 
and God's high thought, and man's poor small 
thought, if it be a true thought, are not at enmity, 
but in accord. 

Now, the way of thinking in our own time, in 
Europe and America, is in some respects a new 
way. 

It has arisen from the study and investigation 
of physical phenomena, which have never been so 
enthusiastically pursued as now. 

When we examine closely as to actual attain- 
ment in those studies, we find that, after all, our 



20 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



gains nave not been great. The human mind has 
driven up at every turn against the profound dark 
of the unknown. The advances we have made 
have not been in knowing the essence of things, 
but in increased skill and facility in handling and 
using powers of which we absolutely know nothing 
in themselves. 

We make the lightning, it is said, run our 
errands and light our streets ; but we are as pro- 
foundly ignorant of what electricity is, as ever. 
Our advances and advantages have been gained 
for us rather by the practical men who did not 
waste their time in studying the science of the 
subject, but who set to work at once utilizing their 
material, content to let its essence remain un- 
known. 

From the locomotive-engine, the telephone and 
the telegraph, to the reaping-machine, it is mar- 
vellously little we owe to the scientific people. 
The inventor of the steam-engine did not trouble 
himself about the correlation or conservation of 
energy, indeed, knew nothing about them under 
such names ; and the inventor of the electric 
telegraph was content in his ignorance to call 
electricity a fluid, use it as he could, and let the 
rest go. 

The leavening of our daily bread is a thing 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



21 



familiar in all kitchens, and has so been for several 
thousand years ; but our most learned chemists are 
disputing yet over at least three theories of the 
process. The unscientific baker happily does not 
trouble himself about the science of the subject, 
else we should have no rolls for our breakfast. 

In a confused and wild way of writing and talk- 
ing which has become too common, people have 
gotten the notion that we have mastered the 
secrets of nature, have discovered nearly all things 
unknown, and that our scientific men can explain 
every thing in nature. 

On closer examination we find that we have 
discovered amazingly little ; that the great mother 
veils her face, and wraps the sombre drapery about 
her stately form, and declines to be interviewed 
by no matter what scientific committee. 

A certain uneasiness, it must be confessed, 
existed a while since, under the fancy that our 
discoveries in science had become so great that 
religion and Almighty God might be found the 
superfluous myths of an ignorant past. And so 
arose a considerable literature concerned about 
the reconciling of religion and science, — a litera- 
ture, I venture to say, such as our children will 
look back upon with little reverence for the wis- 
dom of their fathers ; a literature where religion 



22 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



and science were both at their weakest, and men 
were trying to apologize to the temporary theo- 
ries of an hour, to the finder of a flint arrow-head 
or a human skull, for their belief in Almighty 
God, and eternal righteousness, and the awful 
mystery of human life ; a literature only to be 
compared with its opposite, — that in which every 
experimentalist who had discovered a new microbe 
or a new chemical compound felt himself at once 
qualified to declare the throne of the universe 
vacant, and himself capable of explaining and 
accounting for all things seen and unseen. 

Such literatures, pitiful and sad in the insin- 
cerity and abject fear of the one, and in the con- 
ceit and impertinence of the other, were cast up 
like scum and froth upon the surface, in the first 
ferment of an ignorant age just entering upon 
somewhat larger knowledge, — the bubbles of its 
sophomoric vanity. They will be both curious 
studies in psychology to the men of the twentieth 
century ! 

But the tide is already on the turn. We find, 
after all our boasting, that the world still remains 
where it was, and that the old secrets of the eter- 
nal stars and the gray deeps remain secrets still ; 
and our more modest Science folds her hands 
before the sphinx, and confesses that she has 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



23 



never seen and is now quite sure she never can 
see any thing as it is, but only as it seems : her 
field is phenomena, not reality. She sees that the 
grass is green ; but why it is green, what makes 
it green, whether the green is in her eye or in 
the grass, what, in fact, green is, all the scientists 
in Europe and America are as ignorant about as 
their hide-clad ancestors in the time of Caesar. 

But while the study of phenomena has never 
revealed to us any thing but phenomena, it has 
originated a philosophy, a metaphysics, a way of 
looking at things, which is peculiar to our time, 
and has its influence upon all thinking people. 

In plain English, that way is about this : That 
things grow ; that an oak-tree presupposes an 
acorn, a chick an egg, an apple an apple-tree ; 
that an effect has a cause ; that things come 
regularly and in order ; that beginnings of great 
things are very small things ; that there are 
germs for all results; in fact, that " great oaks 
from little acorns grow,'* according to the old 
child rhyme ; that all to-days are the children of 
yesterdays ; that you can depend upon things, 
therefore ; that law is uniform ; that, as the wise 
man said long ago, " There is nothing new under 
the sun ;" that times go by turns, and the world 
is a world of sowings and of harvests. 



24 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



Though the doctrine be announced in sounding 
phrase and learned majesty, and call itself devel- 
opment, evolution, or what not, that is really what 
it is in English, — not very wonderful, after all, 
nor very formidable, and certainly thoroughly in 
accord with revelation up to this point. The 
addition made to it, that all this order and rule, 
these germs and growths, came by chance, is not 
of course Christian ; but also it is not science. 

Our scientific people have found this theory 
an admirable working hypothesis, at all events. 
It is a safe theory to go upon in the study of phe- 
nomena. One phenomenon is always supposed to 
be caused by another. The germ of any thing is 
to be supposed, sought for, whether it be the germ 
of a world, or the germ in a case of cholera. And 
good results may come to men from finding the 
germ of cholera, and killing it, or finding the germ 
of a newer and better world, and caring for and 
fostering it. For we do not want cholera, and we 
do want a new and better world. 

Now, does revelation find itself at discord with 
this philosophy? Or can it express itself and 
make itself understood, explain and illustrate 
itself, in the language of our modern way of 
thinking ? Is it in accord with the spirit of our 
time, as it has been with that of other times in 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



25 



which it has given light and leading to the souls 
of men ? 

It is certainly a very different way of thinking 
from that of the last century. We had a brass- 
clock world then, wound up some thousands of 
years ago, and running by its original momentum 
ever since. The Maker occasionally interfered 
in the way of what were called special provi- 
dences, when the machine got some people into 
difficulties, so the religious folk honestly believed 
and prayed ; but really the scientific people had 
found out so much, as they thought, about what 
they were pleased to call the laws of nature, that 
after the machine was once started, there did not 
seem to science nor to religion either any neces- 
sity for a God, except to regulate the machine 
occasionally. The general idea, I think, was, that 
He had gone off, and was taking His ease, well 
pleased with His work which He had pronounced 
"good," and would not do much in any case, and 
generally ought not to be expected to do much, 
even for the elect, till the time came for Him to 
break the machine all to pieces and burn it up. 

And yet men could devoutly read and believe 
their Bibles, and find something in them to accord 
with even such a poor, shallow, mechanic theory 
as this ! We certainly owe it to our scientific- 



26 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



people, that they have made such a theory of the 
world forever impossible among thinking people. 
Whether their own theory may not be sent to 
keep it company by the scientific people of the 
twentieth century, is of no special consequence 
to anybody. 

44 Our little systems have their day, 
They have their day, and cease to be." 

The verities and realities remain the same. 

But we may safely say that if Christian men 
could find the formulas of such a theory fit for 
their use, and even helpful, as they surely were, 
to the steadfastness of their faith and the comfort 
of their hope, - they now need fear neither the lan- 
guage nor the formulas of any philosophic theory 
whatsoever. 

Turning to the philosophy, if we may so call it, 
of our own time, and its relation to revelation, one 
is struck with two facts in the New Testament : 
first, the underlying doctrine of the uniformity of 
natural and spiritual processes ; and, second, that 
development is the law of the spiritual kingdom. 

The teaching of our Lord was by parable. 
" Without a parable spake he not unto them." 
Now, underlying every parable is the doctrine 
that the same law holds and the same power 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



27 



works in the spiritual as in the material. Other- 
wise there could be no teaching by parable at all. 
"Consider the lilies, how they grow." What 
point in that, unless the Lord of the lily is the 
Lord also of the man, unless the law of lily 
growth and care be the law also of human growth 
and human care ? 

"A sower went forth to sow." He is type of 
the Lord Himself. But there is no meaning in 
it unless all seed-growth be the same. The law 
by which the sparrow lives is the law also by 
which the archangel lives. The stars in their 
courses are ruled by the same hand that feeds 
the ravens. In every parable the Lord assumes 
the sameness of the Worker and the sameness 
of the law by which He works, in the natural 
and in the spiritual both. 

You may be perfectly familiar with this line of 
thought ; and yet I must emphasize it, because, 
in my reading at least, I have not found it in 
discussions upon the parables sufficiently dwelt 
upon. The whole possibility of the teaching by 
parable rests upon the assumption that the law is 
the same in the spiritual and the material world ; 
that out of the darkness sweeps one small seg- 
ment of a measureless circle, but that small 
segment, understood and measured, will give us 



28 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



the magnificent curve of law which encloses the 
earth and hell and heaven, and touches the 
throne of God. 

The Christian man calls it the will of God, the 
uniform energy of the unchangeable Lord, who 
is present, immanent, creative in all worlds, and 
the same in all, so that His working in the lowest 
explains His working in the highest, since " in 
Him is no variableness, neither shadow of turn- 
ing." 

The scientific man calls it the uniformity of 
law, or any name he pleases. The fact is the 
same under any name. But surely the revelation 
of " Him who changeth not," the Lord " who is 
the same yesterday, to-day, and forever," has no 
quarrel with a theory which declares that Science 
has at last discovered, in her poor way, what that 
revelation proclaimed forty centuries ago, and 
which, eighteen centuries since, the Lord Jesus 
Christ took as the foundation of that most touch- 
ing, tender, and wonderful of all teaching, — the 
teaching by parable, when He spake as never 
man spake, and baptized our poor, old, common- 
place world with the light that belonged to it too, 
the one light and the one law of the Father who 
is in earth and heaven and hell the same. 

But again, in the case of His own kingdom, 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



29 



which He has come to preach and establish, He 
makes the law of its growth always a development. 

It leads to much that it will be wholesome to 
ponder on : that this law should be plainly an- 
nounced, and lie upon the pages of the New 
Testament, and be publicly read and preached 
for eighteen centuries as the law of the eternal 
and spiritual kingdom ; and that after those cen- 
turies it should be at last discovered, as a sort 
of triumph of human reasoning, to be the law of 
the temporal and phenomenal, or what we call 
natural, kingdom also ! 

" The kingdom of heaven cometh not with ob- 
servation." " First the blade, then the ear, then 
the full corn in the ear." "The kingdom of 
heaven is like a grain of mustard-seed, which a 
man cast into his garden ; and it grew, and waxed 
a great tree, and the fowls of the air came and 
lodged in the branches." "The kingdom of God 
is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in 
three measures of meal, till the whole was 
leavened." 

Here is plainly laid down the law of seeds and 
germs and cells, of silent growth and unnoticed 
working, of development from the little to the 
great, of life organizing itself out of the dark, 
of development from the germ. 



30 



THE LAW OF GROWTH 



And this is declared to be the way and order 
of growth, not only of the kingdom of heaven in 
its outward organized appearance, but in its 
inner spiritual nature, growing in the heart of 
a man. "The kingdom of heaven is within you. ,, 
But, indeed, need we be surprised ? since, going 
to the very beginning, we find this : " I will 
put enmity between thee and the woman, be- 
tween thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise 
thy head." It was a small germ enough, — such 
a promise ; but out of it grew the Jewish Church, 
the Law of Moses and the Psalms of David, the 
prophecies of Isaiah, the Temple of Solomon, 
the Four Gospels, at last all sacraments and 
liturgies, all theologies, all churches, and all 
missions. 

A child lies in the feeding-trough of the khan 
at Bethlehem. There was another beginning 
and another germ, small enough, humble enough, 
in the manger. But the manger held a Roman 
Empire converted, the civilization of the rulers 
of the coming world, the art of Italy, the law 
and literature of Europe, the poems of Shak- 
speare, the discovery of America. 

The mustard - seed grows, the leaven works 
unseen. The whole history, like the whole 
teaching, is of germs of life and vital seed devel- 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



3 1 



oping, as all things grow in nature, noiselessly, 
invisibly, by the will and power of God. 

The theology of the Catholic Church, I need 
scarcely remind you, has always been in accord 
with the Lord's teaching in this matter, The 
spiritual life, in her view, has always come from 
an implanted germ in the individual soul. Her 
position herein has been assailed, and some- 
times blindly and bitterly ; but she has never 
faltered in her allegiance to the Master's teach- 
ing. The germ sown in holy baptism she sowed 
in His name in faith and prayer, and looked to 
see develop after its kind, "first the blade, then 
the ear, then the full corn in the ear." She has 
not looked to convert the world by cyclones of 
religious fervor, though cyclones have their place, 
nor to bring in the kingdom with drum-roll and 
trumpet-blare. She has followed and believed in 
the power of patient culture, of slow growth, of 
watchful care, of hereditary faith, of household 
sanctities, of a mother's crooning cradle-hymn, 
of a father's prayers, of a faithful pastor's watch 
and guard, of catechizing and creed teaching, of 
a religion that forms character and grows into 
life by the fireside, in the school, in the Church, 
among baptized children. 

And in all this she has walked with human 



32 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



wisdom and science, as with divine. Other the- 
ories have been noisy, aggressive, condemnatory. 
But Wisdom is justified of all her children: and 
thoughtful people are fast seeing that here, too, 
the growth is by order and law ; that character 
comes from seed sown and developed in fitting 
seed-beds ; and that the grandest growth, — the 
growth of a Christian man, — like the growth of 
_ a lichen, is a growth by a fixed order which we 
can understand and provide for. 

Consider, then, with me, what should be our 
attitude, as Christian men, toward the way of 
thinking of our time. 

We must live in our own time. We may mourn 
for the "ages of faith," as some have called them, 
but it is an unreasonable and weak regret. The 
past has gone into the darkness of its dead years, 
and taken with it its own difficulties and its own 
advantages. Our age is no less a day of God than 
any past, and it is clear that a man must do his 
work, and fail or triumph, for his own generation. 
Whether or no, we are dominated by what the 
Germans call the " Zeit-Geist" — the spirit of our 
day. He is somewhat of a fantastic oddity who 
thinks to live outside it, or to wall it out ; and he 
is scarce a believer in a living God if he do not 
accept his own century for as good and blessed 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



33 



and divine a century as any in which God has 
reigned. 

Men of the day, we are in the tide of the 
thoughts of our day. It is where God has placed 
us. Let us humbly thank Him therefor, and do 
the work that is our own and no man's else. 

This attitude accepts gladly and thankfully all 
discoveries, all advance in knowledge, all honest, 
helpful, serious thinking which clears difficulties 
and brings light. Believing in God, it not only 
tolerates but welcomes any fact or truth of God's, 
working reverently, thankfully, and fearlessly. 

The truth or fact will find its place at last built 
into the temple of God, a carved stone for some 
column, or an ashlar for some buttress. 

Draw a broad distinction between the revelation, 
and our poor human inferences therefrom. Do 
not fear lest, when any theory of ours about reli- 
gion is made untenable, that therefore religion is 
henceforth impossible. 

There is no threatened destruction of our 
divine religion, no breach in its walls, no crumbling 
of its towers. Man is a religious animal. What- 
ever else he is or is not, he is that. However you 
may explain his becoming so, that is the fact, 
— just as scientific and unquestionable a fact as 
the Pacific Ocean, and the Isthmus of Panama. 



34 



THE LAW OF GROWTH, 



It stands facing all theories, with unblenching 
eyes. 

And another fact stands equally a matter of 
science, and equally unassailable : that, whereso- 
ever He has been presented to that instinct in 
man, Jesus of Nazareth has been accepted as its 
satisfaction and completion, as the incarnate ful- 
filment of all human ideals, and the Mediator and 
Daysman between man and God. 

The Catholic faith is a religion of facts, not 
of speculations. For Christ is His own religion, 
Christ is Christianity. And that faith is corre- 
lated to other facts, to the world, and to man. 
Here lies the heart of the whole ; and a scientific 
religion can be built, if it be worth while, upon 
this, — Jesus Christ Himself, however, the corner- 
stone. 

It is my purpose, in these lectures, to look at 
certain matters of religion and the Church of God 
in the lights of our own time ; to go with, in some 
important respects, and not against, the way of 
thinking about us. I think we shall find some 
things clearer by that method ; at all events, that 
we can use the language of our day reverently and 
fearlessly upon the sacred mysteries of our faith, 
and think upon the loftiest things in the way men 
think upon the lowest. But, O Light and Love 



THE LAW OF GROWTH. 



35 



divine ! without whom no sparrow falls, nor any 
star burns out into the dark, how know we what 
is lofty and what is lowly, in ourselves, in Thy 
worlds, or in Thee ? One thing we know : that 
Thou changest not, that Thy Almighty love and 
care are over all Thy children, and all the work of 
Thy hands, and that Thy works reveal Thee and 
praise Thee, whether they be the morning stars 
that sing together when a world is born, or an 
insect that hums in the noonday beam. 

Along the winding shores of the blue ^Egean 
went from echoing cliff to cliff the cry one day, 
" Great Pan is dead ! " And the Dryads heard it 
in the wood, and the Nymphs by the fountains 
uttered it, and fled from classic stream and hill 
and headland. A religion died. 

And later, once again, a cry more mournful 
moaned among the rocking pines and along the 
desolate fiords of the North, " Balder is dead, 
Balder the beautiful! " And Odin and Thor and 
mother Freya faded into the gray mists of their 
dim Walhalla forever. A religion died. 

Yes, religions have died. But they die before 
the face of the white Christ, who died to conquer, 
and rose again, and is alive for evermore, King of 
kings, and Lord of lords. 



LECTURE II. 
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 



And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful 
ajid multiply ', and replenish the earth, and subdue it. 

Gen. i. 28. 

And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and behueen 
thy seed and her seed ; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shall bruise 
his heel. 

Gen. iii. 15. 

And unto Adam He said, . . . Cursed is the ground for thy 
sake ; in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns 
also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee ; and thou shall eat the 
hej'b of the field. In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread, till 
thou return unto the ground ; for out of it wast thou taken : for dust 
thou art, and unto dust shall thou return. 

Gen. iii. 17-19. 



LECTURE II. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

\ TAN stood an exile at the gate of Eden. 

There had been a duty given, and now 
also there is a promise. "Replenish the earth, 
and subdue it," was the command. " The seed 
of the woman shall bruise the head of the ser- 
pent," is the promise, in the face of the admitted 
evil. 

Here is the revealed starting-point of human 
history. Admit the mystery and the dimness of 
the making and the fall ; here, at least, is a 
beginning which has a rational and scientific 
possibility. 

Man stands facing a wild world, — a world of 
briers and thorns, of hostile powers and , manifes- 
tations, a world of frosts and fires, of tempests 
and hail, of earthquakes, lightnings, and volca- 
noes, of evil beasts and evil airs, of pestilent 
swamp and reeking morass, of floods and 
droughts, — and he is told to master it. It is the 

39 



40 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

charter by which he holds his place upon it, that 
he is subduing it. 

And face to face with evil in this guise, — the 
evil of apparently lawless power, unsubdued to 
rationality and sweet human use, — there comes 
to him the warning, " It shall bruise thy heel. ,, 
" Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to 
thee." There will be sore toil and pain. The 
years shall be gloomed with darkness, and their 
days and nights thick with human cries and tears. 
Thy feet will be wounded on the flints, and thy 
hands torn with the thorns. Thou shalt be heavy 
burdened and sore smitten all thy years, and die, 
and make a passage with thy bleaching bones for 
thy children's children to march over. Sickness 
and sorrow and death shall be thine, and thou 
shalt fail and perish, and in thy day see no sign. 
But the end is sure. "Thou shalt bruise his 
head. ,, The seed of the woman shall triumph. 
Evil, typified by the serpent, even in its outward 
manifestation of material unrest and unreason, 
shall be trampled down. The mother's son shall 
stand at last, bruised, wounded, bleeding, but vic- 
tor, with the conquering heel upon the serpent's 
crest, the world's master, and his own, because 
the son of the woman is also the Son of God. 

It is the reading of all the myths. We might 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 4 1 

expect it so. If, as is most rational to believe, 
all myths are shadowy remembrances of a primal 
reality, — the common knowledge and faith of the 
race before it was scattered, — there is a satisfac- 
tory explanation. But even if myths be but the 
common expression of the common experience of 
humanity struggling with its environment, the 
sameness is accounted for. 

The giants of the frosts and the fires, with 
which our Norse forefathers believed the children 
of the East — the Aeser — wrestled in sore pain, 
and held subdued by force of hourly vigilance and 
straining strength, are only other names for the 
fiercer and more malignant Rakshasas of India, 
against whom men and Inclra strive without 
ceasing. 

But, myths apart, it is the fact of history, and 
now, at last, the proclamation of science. 

From the gray dawn of his birth, as far as we 
have history of him in any shape at all, man has 
been at spear's point with the world. He has 
held his own in it everywhere and always by the 
strong hand. Relax his struggle, sleep on his 
watch, and he sinks to the savage, half way to 
the brute. He tames the world, or the world 
imbrutes him. There has never been any other 
issue from the north pole to the south, with white 



42 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

man or black man. Man, to be a man, must 
subdue his environment. 

It is the dream of a fantastic and sickly senti- 
mentality, that man lives well when he lives in 
peace with Nature. She has marshes to drain ; 
he must drain them, or die of malaria. She has 
forests to be felled, burned up, rooted away, or he 
starves. She has rivers to wall in, or his harvests 
and his house are swept away. She has seas to 
wall out, or he must blot brave Holland from ex- 
istence, and many a fair green land beside. She 
has tides and tempestuous seas and the shattering 
surge upon the harbor-bar to master, or he is cut 
off from his kind. She has mountain-sides into 
which he must rend and hammer his way, or he 
has no temples for his God and no palaces for his 
king. She has caverns to be searched with fire 
and iron, or he has no plough for his fields and no 
embers upon his hearth. He must delve and 
trench and carve, must tear and trample and 
burn, wall out and wall in, and be master above 
and below, in water, in earth, and in air, or he can 
have no London and no New York. 

He builds a cathedral because he has subdued. 
He gets his dinner because he has subdued, also. 
He builds a palace for his learning or his law, 
because in so far as he has mastered. He builds 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 43 

a cottage in his little field on the same condition. 
The Capitol in Washington is a symbol of his 
triumph. The log cabin in a Western clearing 
attests also the presence of the world-subduer. 

Here is a creature, the weakest and tenderest 
of all things animal on the face of the earth, with 
neither teeth nor claws to rend, nor fur nor 
feather to cover him, who can neither fight nor 
run nor hide, can neither plunge into the water 
nor soar into the air, whom the sun burns and 
the cold freezes ; and this creature accepts the 
situation, and fights the world in which he lives 
tooth and nail for breathing-room and his dinner 
to begin with, and then, flushed with his victory, 
declines to make peace on any terms save final 
abject surrender, heel on head, — tired, wounded, 
aching, bleeding, but heel on head, — so only will 
he stand when his highest consciousness wakens, 
— the savant just as fierce and tireless for new 
victories in knowledge, and new grasps upon 
Nature's powers, as the hungry savage for the 
roots or prey that will supply his wigwam. And 
now science, as it is called, comes, and repeats in 
its language, as if it were a new discovery of its 
own, the old statement of the law of human posi- 
tion in the world, declared in Genesis, shadowed 
dimly in every myth, faint echo of the primal 



44 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

experience and the primal command, and told on 
every page of human story where there are pages 
at all ! 

"Developing?" Yes, developing since the 
dawn ! Always developing, that is the story of 
the race. Developing from what? Upon that, 
all science is dumb. You may guess, and your 
guess may be right or wrong, but it is only a 
guess. The known fact is, that whenever man is 
found in history, on the book page, on the clay 
cylinder, on the hieroglyphic monolith, in the cave 
drift, he is always developing, and developing by 
fighting his surroundings. Developing to what ? 
Again science only guesses. 

Not a beast of prey, he is always in battle. 
His story in Genesis and his story in the Pyra- 
mids, his story in the Abbeville caves and his 
story on the Acropolis of Athens, is the story of 
a creature always fighting, always wounded, and 
yet always victorious. 

It is not a story of uniform victory. There are 
repulses and defeats all along the line now and 
then. Here and there even a whole wing gives 
way and falls to the rear, — a false development 
perishes, — but the march is straight on, of the 
whole army. Putting aside guesses, fantastic 
speculations and dreams of the scientific or other 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 45 



imagination, the visible fact is, that, whenever we 
deal with facts, man is steadily advancing, steadily 
conquering, steadily developing, and more and 
more subduing the world. 

And mark here, that this development does not 
come from any struggle for existence merely. In 
man's case it is a struggle for mastery, rather 
than a struggle to be. In other cases, the exist- 
ence secured, the creature is at peace with the 
environment. The fish does not fight the sea. 
The eagle accepts the air. The tiger is content 
with the jungle. Suppose their development, up 
to this point, due to struggle with the environ- 
ment for existence ; having reached it, there is no 
effort further. 

The strange, unique position of man with refer- 
ence to his environment is that he declines to 
accept it, declines to consider it final ; absolutely 
objects to sea and sky and land, to mountain, 
valley, or stream, until each has submitted to him 
and confesses him master. He refuses to com- 
promise with the lightning after he has made it 
harmless to his roof. He declines to rest content 
with Franklin's truce. He insists on collaring it 
with iron, and sending it round the world on his 
errands, labelled with his name. 

His position toward his environment has been 



46 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

always that of conscious opposition. We say he 
becomes accustomed to the heat, or accustomed to 
the cold. In a real sense he does neither. The 
Siberian fossil elephant is wool-covered. The 
African elephant is hairless. That is, in each 
case the environment conquered the animal as far 
as such modification. But the Eskimo is quite 
as unprotected from cold, as far as his person is 
concerned, as is the African. In each case the 
man masters the environment. He defends him- 
self from the cold, and defends himself from the 
heat, alike defying both. 

But he is modified? Yes, but how much? 
Take him in his highest development, and he will 
face the Arctic circle one year and equatorial 
Africa the next, and you will meet him, un- 
changed by either, the year after in a New-York 
drawing-room. He has beaten the cold, and 
beaten the heat, and remains unmodified by 
either, — a prosperous, civilized gentleman. 

Start at the Gulf, and follow up the great river 
to Lake Itasca. Grass and flower, plant and tree, 
bird and insect, reptile and quadruped, change as 
you go. You leave one form behind, and find 
another. The orange of New Orleans disappears 
for the pawpaw of Ohio; and the cane-brake of 
Louisiana is changed for the cranberry-swamp 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 47 

of Wisconsin, for the wild-rice marsh of Minne- 
sota. The mocking-bird's song is left in the 
South, and the loon screams on the blue lakes of 
the North. But while all in sky and land and 
water has changed, one creature alone has not 
changed. The American man is the same in 
Louisiana and Minnesota, in Alabama and 
Dakota. He declines to change with the chan- 
ging degrees. He knows no North and no South. 
The whole land and the long river are his own : 
he has subdued both. 

It is not man's effort to come into harmony with 
his environment, but to make the environment 
come into harmony with him. The farther he 
develops, the less is it the question whether he fits 
the environment, and the more it is the ques- 
tion whether the environment fits him. The ratio 
of his progress is the ratio of his indifference to 
his environment, because it expresses the measure 
of his power to make the environment what he 
will. 

The relation of man to the world in which he 
lives is that of master, then. It may be in abey- 
ance for years ; but develop his powers, and that 
is the result. He sees no force in nature that he 
does not undertake to understand and use. His 
instinct is unerring. " I ought to understand that. 



48 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

I ought to be able to turn it to account. I am not 
able to-day. Some day I shall be." Outside his 
power, things are lawless and irrational. They 
need to be captured, collared, and branded, and 
made to do the bidding of the master. Continent, 
island, ocean, all are the same. They need ex- 
ploring, mapping, investigating, mastering. The 
North-west Passage has not been found. But 
while men are men, the quest of years will never 
be abandoned. Men will not be frighted from it 
by the frozen shapes of the pilgrims who have 
fallen by the way, nor by the white death that 
watches from the ghostly ice-cliffs. The secret of 
the pole will be discovered, and the Arctic circle 
marked upon our charts some day with no omis- 
sions of pale crag or shadowy headland. 

There is a development, then, of man upon the 
earth. And it has an end. The development 
results in sovereignty. Nature, if you call her so, 
is developing her master. It is unique among de- 
velopments, but not irrational. The force called 
will — personal will — comes in among the blind 
forces, as a special force from the outside at last, 
and asserts itself, insisting upon its own pleasure 
and its own way. In the highest type of man 
there is that sort of imperiousness about it, which 
instinctively attacks every other force as hostile, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 49 

until it has brought it to subjection. In fact, it 
scarce admits the right of any other force to be, 
unless as amenable and obedient to itself. 

The revealed idea of the world is that it is an 
unfinished world. Pronounced "good," the world 
is not absolute, but relative, good for the purpose 
of its Maker. And to be good for that purpose, it 
must be a developing world, fitted for a developing 
master and occupant. It is nowhere represented 
as a satisfactory and perfected thing. Man is its 
Maker's foreman for completing it, and the first 
command is also a commission. Until it is 
brought under the control of a personal reason and 
will, it is somehow savage and lawless. With 
capacities of beneficence and good, these capaci- 
ties are not developed and made active to a 
rational creature, but by the control of a rational 
will. 

I am not disturbed in this view by the fact that 
man often misuses the world. It is of the very 
essence of his condition as a developing creature, 
that he should make mistakes, and even do great 
wrongs ; trials which result in nothing, efforts 
which do harm. He develops by his blunders as 
by his prudence, grows by his mistakes as by his 
wisdom. He can only learn the right way after 
trying a dozen wrong ways. 



50 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

A complete and perfect world, all of whose 
powers were visible, all its laws plain, 'all its ways, 
all its resources palpable, would be a good world 
possibly for some imaginable intelligences, but not 
a good world for a creature gradually groping 
upward and onward toward higher conditions. A 
perfect world requires, and is only fit for, a perfect 
occupant. 

Science has arrived at last at the inspired con- 
ception of an imperfect world, — a world which is 
growing, developing, progressing ; the outcome of 
ages of toil and wrestle, and agony, and death, but 
yet only the germ of the world that is yet to be. 

But Science is necessarily dumb as to the 
purpose. She only knows what she sees. She 
cannot tell us the beginning of this, nor the end. 
Indeed, she is compelled in her unhelped thinking 
to say that it has no purpose, no beginning, and 
no ending. 

Yet such is the quality of the human intellect, 
that it will not be content. Its demand is for 
reasons and meanings, for causes and purposes. 
Truer than science, as sometimes presented, it 
demands that things shall be accounted for, that 
they shall be rational, that there shall be germs 
to develop, and an outcome to the development ; 
that every thing means something, is connected 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY, 5 I 

with a series of other things, is one link in a chain 
which is endless ; insists on things being reason- 
able, that is, and therefore reasons about them ; has 
an innate compulsion, driving it to ask, " Why are 
these things so ? " 

It would be just intellectual suicide to content 
one's self with labelling and tabulating phenomena. 
The meaning and the purpose of the phenomenon 
— what does the thing mean ? what is it for ? — 
is the problem of men. The beast just eats the 
phenomenon, or drinks it, and thinks no more 
about it. 

I think, in the pursuit of a meaning for the 
questions of the world and man, the meaning 
revealed as the historic faith has taught from the 
beginning is entirely rational, and ignores or 
distorts no fact. 

The world is God's. It is an incomplete world, 
a world that yet needs ordering and reducing and 
humanizing ; a developing world, as science would 
phrase it. Phrasing is of no account : we want 
the fact, not the phrase. God is working at it yet. 
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." 

And such a world is fitted for an imperfect being 
who needs ordering and reducing himself, patient 
training, slow growing from the deep descent 
where the commission finds him, to the lofty 



52 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

heights which are declared to be his goal, — a 
developing being, you see, as science phrases it 
again ; and again I say the phrase is nothing, we 
are looking to the fact. 

God gives the earth to this creature of His, 
because in every condition, no matter how low- 
fallen, how lost and degraded, there is that in him 
which broadly marks him from every other crea- 
ture on the earth : he is capable of mastering it. 
He has the seal of a Maker upon him, in his 
meanest estate. He is in a peculiar sense the son 
of the Maker, and in the image of the Maker. He 
is on his Fathers ground to obey, to command, to 
endure ; for he has a will. 

His business is to break the earth in to obedi- 
ence ; to clean the foul things out, and prosper the 
pure; to restrain the lawless — and his judgment 
shall decide what is lawless, with no appeal ; to 
destroy the savage, to drive out the evil. It is his 
to say whether a mountain shall stand, or be cast 
into the sea ; whether a river shall flow at its own 
will, or be diked in and driven to the sea as he 
wills ; whether a forest shall remain, or a corn- 
field shall stand in its place ; whether the sands of 
Suez shall drift at the wind's will, or a river for 
his ships shall flow at human will ; whether the 
Atlantic and the Pacific shall be walled apart as he 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY, 53 

finds them, or he shall burst the dividing mountain 
barriers and make them for his uses one. 

Grant a Maker at all, and this is all rational. 
This being is the son and heir, the prospective pro- 
prietor of the estate. The Maker fits it for other 
creatures, — that is all reasonable too, — but the 
son is the master, he must fit it for himself. He 
must be left, too, to decide what other creatures 
shall remain his tenants. As he does not hesitate 
to uproot a mountain, or turn a river out of its bed, 
or clear half a continent of its forests, so he does 
not hesitate to annihilate ten million buffaloes, and 
extinguish a whole animal species, because he 
needs the room they occupy. The mastership of 
the world he lives in is a part of his consciousness. 
He will not hesitate to-morrow to turn Sahara into 
an inland sea, if he sees any good for himself in 
it; and in doing it he will be restrained by no fear 
lest any thing should go wrong in the ocean's tides 
or the earth's rainfall, and by no dread lest he 
should extinguish a whole race of animals off the 
face of the earth. 

The insolence of power, one says ? But by him- 
self he has no power. As an animal he would 
perish in one generation. His power rests in this, 
that he has mastered certain secrets and powers 
of what we call nature, and has turned them 



54 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 



against herself. This mastery so far is the pledge 
of mastery further. He has lost, so far, any dread 
of her, has learned that her strongest forces are 
controllable by a will. And he has a will. No 
other thing alive on earth has. And his will is 
imperial, admits no opposition. 

In the play of force between man and his en- 
vironment, both are influenced. So much Science 
can tell us, and has hardly ceased standing as- 
tounded at its own acuteness in observing so 
plain and visible a fact. 

But whereas the end of the struggle with the 
environment in all other animals is peace and con- 
tent, man's struggle with his environment never 
ceases. The bird builds a nest to suit at last, let 
us say, after many trials as some tell us ; but when 
the perfect fitness is reached, its descendants go 
on building exactly the same kind of nest for a 
thousand years. 

Man builds a palace at mighty labor and enor- 
mous cost. But no palace was ever built on earth 
which satisfied the builder, or which the next 
builder did not at once propose to improve. This 
is a type of the whole situation. Man has never 
yet made nor found an environment to suit him ; 
and there is not the slightest scientific indication 
that, upon this earth, he ever will. There is a 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 55 

vast difference between Windsor Castle and the 
royal palace of Dahomey ; and yet so far beyond 
them both is the possible ideal in a highly devel- 
oped intellect and imagination, that the difference 
becomes infinitesimal. 

But the clash of forces — personal will against 
material obstruction — still trains the man, and 
still subdues the material ; develops both, as we 
may say. 

The end is the making of perfect men, ac- 
cording to revelation. Is there any thing un- 
scientific in that ? The end, it seems, of all the 
struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, 
re-action of environment, and the rest, has been 
in one case a perfect tiger, in another a perfect 
eagle. 

We admit their perfection after their kind. It 
satisfies our conceptions, our sense of the fitness of 
things. In its way there can be nothing better. 
The end has come for the striped monarch in the 
jungle, for the red-eyed monarch of the mountain 
summit, — 

" Who clasps the crag with crooked hands, 
Beneath the sun, in lonely lands." 

But man has not attained perfection. As no 
work of his has ever yet satisfied his own ideal, 



56 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

so no man (One excepted) has ever yet satisfied 
himself or other men. 

A case of arrested development we can under- 
stand, and leave it in its ugliness and ineffective- 
ness. But here development still goes on. Here 
still is the passionate protest against imperfection, 
and the determined effort to understand the reason 
and remove it. 

As man protests against his own imperfection, 
so he protests against the world's. He is wrestling 
with both. He never saw a field that might not 
be fairer, a lake that might not be a clearer azure, 
a sunset that might not flame in more magnificence 
of purple and golden splendor, nor a sunrise whose 
spires of gleaming fire might not burn with a 
greater glory of the dawn. He is the world's 
critic, as he is his own, and pronounces no work 
of either perfect. 

Who is this daring being who stands beneath 
the infinite blue of the star-sown spaces, on the 
green graves where his fathers' bones are bleach- 
ing into dust again, child of an hour, soon to lay 
his own beside them, and arraigns himself, his race, 
its sages, its heroes and its demigods, his fathers 
for all the ages, as imperfect, failures, abortions 
of a splendid possibility, rubbishy attempts at 
what man ought to be in his conception ; and who 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 57 

arraigns the world he stands on equally, finds fault 
with its days and nights and the procession of its 
years, criticises its sunlight and its starlight, the 
flow of its rivers, the roar of its cataracts, and the 
sweep of its seas ? criticises all in 

" The vision and the faculty divine ; " 
The light that never was on sea or land." 

Is man an exile ? That is the declaration of 
revelation, and it certainly accounts for what we 
see. The vision of other worlds is about him, 
across his dreams comes the splendor that sleeps 
upon the hills of Paradise. He is a prince, dis- 
crowned and wandering, but a prince still, royal 
though in peasant's guise; and no wonder the 
dim memory of the palaces and the halls raises a 
standard impossible when he would garnish the 
hut of a peasant, or content himself with the 
beauty of the clodded glebe. There can be no 
end to his toil until the world is made again in 
the image of his home. 

I confess I can see no rational way of account- 
ing for this position of man, except the revealed 
way. There has been no theory drawn from 
natural knowledge which at all fills the require- 
ment, except it be in the conceit of the maker. 
No generalization of imperfections makes a per- 



58 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

feet. Nothing that man has known by the senses 
can have created the ideal before which all sensa- 
tions are poor and mean and pale. 

The principle of heredity might give us some 
scientific help. These visions, glimpses, dreams 
of a perfect world, are they the faint memories of 
ancestral condition, as the biologists tell us still 
remain in creatures whose customs and habitat 
have long since changed? The answer of reve- 
lation is plain. Whatever one may make of 
Paradise and the Fall, it is clearly the story of 
an ancestry in other conditions and another envi- 
ronment. At all events, it is quite impossible, 
I think, to get a scientific explanation of man's 
peculiar attitude in any other way. And I think, 
if the turning-about of the domestic dog two or 
three times before he lies down be the remains of 
and the evidence for the ancestral condition, 
when wild dogs turned thus to break down the 
grass for a bed, it is not unscientific to hold that 
man's peculiar attitude toward the world, and his 
peculiar manner of dealing with it, may be a 
reminiscence of an ancestral condition when he 
was consciously and knowingly in accord with his 
environment, because he was God's vicegerent, 
and everywhere the master in a world that obeyed 
him. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 59 

By the light of revelation upon the case, he is 
struggling in no blind wrestle. There is a pur- 
pose ahead, and it is definite. Revelation de- 
clares it to be the recovery of a lost estate. His 
perfection has had its type visible upon the earth. 
Perfect humanity is not a dream. A perfect 
world is not a dream. By the confession of ene- 
mies and friends alike, one Man stands out from 
the historic page perfect, flawless. " Which of 
you convinceth me of sin ? " That challenge 
flashed out into the face of man has never been 
accepted. 

In Jesus Christ, God sees His ideal of human 
nature. Such it was meant to be, such was His 
purpose in the making of it, and such it can be 
again. Because it can be such, God endures it. 
Otherwise one sees not how it escapes being the 
most absurd and inconsequential of all things ex- 
isting. There in the Four Gospels is the story of 
a real Man, His words and His acts ; and the rev- 
elation declares that such a pattern is attainable ; 
and the whole purpose of the world, and its devel- 
opment of man, and his development, the end of 
all the centuries of stress and strain, of toil and 
endeavor, is to bring man in the individual, and in 
the mass, nearer to that likeness. 

And this Man must be definitely set outside the 



60 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

law of development, as distinct, exceptional, and 
unique. To say nothing else, the law requires 
that Christianity be a growth like all else, and 
improve and differentiate in growing. But the 
only perfect Christian was Jesus Christ Himself. 
Eighteen centuries of Christianity has brought 
forth no Christian to be named with the Founder. 
Its perfection is the germ ; and all development 
is to get back to the germ again. "I am Alpha," 
but also " Omega," — the First and the Last, the 
beginning and the ending. 

This Man, no development Himself, out of the 
ordinary stream of earthly causation entirely, 
claims to be the Son of God, and therefore, in 
the only utterly perfect sense, the Son of man. 

His life is the genuine human life ; His posi- 
tion, the genuine human position; His attitude 
towards the world, the perfect attitude of perfect 
men. It is never to be forgotten, that the Chris- 
tian definition of humanity is Christ Himself, 
because He is God's definition. 

Now, what was His attitude toward the world, 
— toward His environment? He was absolute 
Master and Lord of it ! 

"The winds and the sea obey Him." "Peace, 
be still ! " The water is as firm under His feet as 
the land. He walks upon the sea. As the earth 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 6 1 



yields bread to other men by toil, she yielded Him 
food for the five thousand at a wish. Leprosy 
vanishes at his word. Disease disappears in his 
presence. The blind see, and the deaf man 
hears, and the lame walks. Death is at His com- 
mand, and answers to the Master. Everywhere 
Nature and all her forces are His obedient ser- 
vants. He is in all places sovereign. His will 
asserts itself, and Nature obeys. It is a perfect 
human will, and omnipotent over all things, 
because, being a perfect human will, it is one with 
the Divine. 

And on this matter of the will, observe, He not 
only asserts His o'wn, He appeals constantly to 
others to assert theirs. He makes will the power 
imperial. He demands faith for the curing, — 
that is, in the final analysis, the accord of the 
other's will with His own, and the belief in will. 
" Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me 
clean." "I will ! be thou clean." 

It will scarcely meet the case here, to deny 
these things which we call miracles. If the re- 
vealed theory be true, they are simply normal and 
natural to the Man who is the perfect man. That 
is, after all, the conception of them in the New 
Testament. They are revelations of what is pos- 
sible, what is even necessary, when men are in 
their true relations. 



62 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 



These things the sons of God do, so the one 
true Son showed by doing them. This way the 
sons of God live, so He showed by living. 
" Greater works than these shall ye do," was His 
own word. 

That men could have conceived such an ideal, 
supposing the miracles inventions of men, is a 
harder thing to explain than the admission of 
their truth. Is it possible to conceive where they 
got this idea of what a perfect man ought to do 
and ought to say, and how such an one would 
stand toward Nature ? For, mark, it is not merely 
wonder-works and strange manifestations : these 
have been imagined, and may be again. It is 
the whole situation, — the works and their sur- 
roundings, their moral character; and His who 
does them. They are a part of the whole concep- 
tion. They belong to the character; and I hesi- 
tate not to assert, with thousands of thoughtful 
men, that for the men of his day, or indeed any 
day, to have imagined and wrought out the con- 
ception of Jesus Christ, would have been a won- 
der more unexplainable, more bewildering, than 
any miracle or all the miracles recorded in Old 
Testament or New. 

Observe here that I am not dwelling upon the 
moral so much now, but rather upon the physical 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 63 

side of man's mastery of the world. That mas- 
tery has been too often looked upon as a mere 
blind struggle of forces ; and in the explanations 
given of it, or the non-explanations, from the 
agnostic or material side, that is all it is, and 
the end is of no consequence in any case. 

We are told that the time is coming when the 
poor earth shall be exhausted of all force, and 
swing cold and frozen in the blackness of icy 
space ; sun, moon, and stars all gone dead about 
it. An ingenious gentleman has explained that 
cheerful theory as the established " scientific " 
one, in a neat little book which is quite seriously 
intended. 

The factors of a Maker, and a tenant in the 
Maker's likeness, — so much so that he is taught 
to call the Maker his Father, — the factors of 
sense and will, eliminated out of the whole affair, 
such an end is perhaps natural enough, and at all 
events is just as good an end as a stupid affair of 
the sort deserves. Indeed, one wonders rather 
that it has, being without any sense, kept from 
going to some sort of smash so long. 

It is a relief to see, however, the common- 
sense way in which men that are not scientific 
go right on beautifying, bettering, civilizing the 
world, making their homes upon it, finding daily 



64 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

new riches in it, mastering it continually to 
sweeter, fairer uses, — doing just what the Maker 
told them to do with it from the first, in simple 
confidence in God and in themselves. 

For the Christian faith gives us the future, as 
it does the present. In the prayer, " Our Father 
which art in Heaven," past, present, and future 
meet in one eternal Now. 

Duty where a man is, the duty at his feet, — 
that is for man. To aid the doing of the duty, to 
guard the doer, to bless the thing done, and roll 
out the future in its order, — this is God's. 

What catastrophe may be signified in the awful 
words of St. Peter, the Church has not decided, 
and no man knows. But that there is among all 
the stars that roll, and all the suns that shine, 
some special grace and love for the little world 
whose bread the Lord ate, whose water He 
drank, whose air He breathed, which He baptized 
with the sweat-drops of Gethsemane and the 
blood and water of Calvary, is a conviction inevi- 
table to the Christian. Christ, in some sense, 
redeemed the earth itself. 

So it is a duty, as one of our scientists under- 
takes to tell us, — leaving his "science" and turn- 
ing preacher for the time, — it is our duty "to 
make some small spot upon the earth better and 



THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 65 



brighter." But for this duty we Christians can 
give a sanction: " science" can give none, — 
science, which tells us that all is upon its road 
into icy blackness and the perfect equilibrium of 
eternal death. 

It is our duty, because the earth is our Father's, 
and He has given it to the children of men, His 
children; because we are His tenants upon it, 
and responsible ; because His eternal Son lived 
our life upon it, died, was buried upon it, and rose 
from it ; because it is a ransomed earth, once 
trodden by the feet of God. 

Therefore it is not mere caprice, but duty, that 
we toil to civilize it, to make it rational, human, 
healthful, kindly, fair, and bountiful. And we do 
our daily work under God's blessing, doing it 
manfully, dutifully. He shall bring it to a right, 
reasonable, and good end. 

And some day we shall see that mortal life is 
indeed a struggle, a sore wrestle with laboring 
lungs and throbbing veins, and straining muscles 
and aching brain. But it is not a fight of wolves 
or jackals for carrion, that the greediest and the 
strongest may survive. It is God's battle, and 
man's, a grand fight of knights and brothers and 
gentlemen, under the eternal Man our Brother 
and our King, shoulder to shoulder, against all 



66 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 

that is foul and false and base and bad, because 
these are our Father's enemies and the world's 
enemies as they are our own, and have no busi- 
ness here, in the final idea, upon God's green 
world, and under the eyes and hands of the chil- 
dren of God and the soldiers of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. 



LECTURE III. 
THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



For I reckon that the sufferings of this present tiine are not worthy 
to be compared zvith the glory that shall be revealed in us. 

For the ear?iest expectation of the creation 1 waiteth for the mani- 
festation of the sons of God, For the creation was made subject to 
vanity, not zvillingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the 
same in hope. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from 
the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of 
God, 

Rom. viii. 18-21. 

1 Revised Version. 



LECTURE III. 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 

OUR battle with the material world, which 
God put us upon the earth to fight, goes 
bravely on, these days, they tell us. There is 
loud boasting, in some quarters, of our success. 
We have found out, it is said, so many secrets, we 
have mastered so many resources, that we may 
consider ourselves at last certain of the victory, 
and may even claim the estate for our own, and 
refuse to recognize the Landlord ! 

And this conceit, natural enough under the 
circumstances, has made us arrogant and pre- 
sumptuous, as if we possessed all knowledge and 
could answer all doubts, and get on very well 
without a God or a revelation of His will. 

This also, an intellectual effervescence of the 
time, is not to be wondered at ; nor, surely, should 
we wonder that in some quarters there should 
be a feeling of fear and distrust, as if faith were 
endangered by material knowledge, and men 

69 



7o 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



were about to be left lost children on the shore 
of an infinite black deep, from whence can come 
no answer to their cries but the moan of winds 
and the sullen plunging of desolate seas. 

There are voices prompt to say that this is the 
position into which we are forced by science. 
We must be content to consider ourselves prod- 
ucts of the earth we are mastering, beginning 
with it, ending with it, — not sons of God and 
heirs of the infinite, but temporary products of 
an hour, growths of the dust, to return again to 
the dust without hope. 

Now, granting freely our increased knowledge, 
and being thankful therefor, one asks, first of all, 
Wherein has it profited? Are we nearer than 
were our fathers to reading the riddle of exist- 
ence ? Have we solved a single one of the origi- 
nal questions that are vital to humanity ? Have 
we made life one whit more worth the living ? 

We have made some beginnings toward the 
great triumph of reason and will over the brutal 
stupidity of things without mind. Let the boast- 
ers, for the present, make the most of our small 
attainments. To me they are mainly valuable as 
an earnest of the vaster knowledge coming, and 
the vaster power. But is human life happier ? 
Have men become more content ? 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME, 



71 



Because we travel by rail and not by stage- 
coach, have our messages sent by electricity and 
not on horseback, our clothes stitched by machines 
and not by hand, oleomargarine on our breakfast- 
tables instead of butter, and instead of sugar 
glucose, are we so much wiser and better than 
our fathers ? 

How many Chicagos are the equivalent of one 
Athens ? How many millionnaire manufacturers 
of lard from cotton-seed go to the making of one 
Plato ? How many glucose-factories equal one 
Parthenon ? Would you swap " Macbeth " or 
"King Lear" for the longest railroad in the 
United States? or "Paradise Lost" for all the 
pork ever packed, or all the lard ever adulterated ? 

George Washington never rode on a railroad, nor 
sent a message by telegraph, and sewing-machines 
and lucifer matches were alike unknown at Mount 
Vernon. It does not occur to any one that we 
have much improved upon him in the way of 
Presidents of the United States ! 

It is not knowledge, nor the advantages won 
from Nature, that much affect man in what makes 
him man. His life, the heart and reality of him, 
are inside, and distinct from his circumstances. 
The things nearest him, the essentials of his posi- 
tion, his character, and his hope, are never touched 



72 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



by any power or any knowledge won from matter. 
The primal questions of humanity are here yet, 
and before them science is dumb. 

It is idle to tell us they are insoluble, that our 
time is wasted in the asking; for men will just 
keep on asking them in the teeth of all " science." 
They will not down at any man's bidding. There 
is nothing to charm them into silence in any 
knowledge of matter and its ways. 

Pain, sorrow, heart-break, the pit dug across 
every man's road, the skeleton that keeps the 
keys, right, wrong, sin and its penalties, the dim 
hereafter in which all men instinctively believe, 
— these things are with us, and these things will 
stay. 

They are as real as the Alps. They belong to 
ignorant people and wise people, to the savage 
and the civilized. They are persistent facts of 
human nature. 

A genuine science dare not ignore them. It 
must find a place for them in any theory, — 
must at least try to account for their being, though 
utterly helpless to explain them. 

For there is but one thing unchangeable on the 
earth, as far as we know, — the human soul. All 
else is phenomenon. The waters wear away the 
stones, the mountains crumble downward to the 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



73 



plain, the rocks decay and fall ; but the soul of 
man changes not. Across six thousand years he 
tells us the same story when he has had voice 
at all. 

And his profoundest utterance has never been 
for food or drink, for clothes or shelter. His cry 
to the stars above him and the abysses below, 
across the wastes of an empty land and over the 
sullen moaning of far-plunging seas, has been to 
the invisible, the unknowable, the awful powers 
that lie above him and beneath him. " How am 
I connected with them ? for I am connected. It 
is idle to talk to me of the things about me as if 
they were all ; for they are not mine, nor am I of 
their family. I can walk no road that does not 
lead me at least to the awfulness of the un- 
known, and that unknown holds the things that 
I must meet and deal with/' 

Why, the very men that tell us there is no 
sense in wasting our time on things invisible, for 
we can know nothing about them, are driven 
themselves, out of all experience, out of all knowl- 
edge, out of all fact of the senses, to found their 
whole present theory of the universe upon an 
invisible and unknowable atom, — a pure concep- 
tion of the human intellect. 

Look upon man's position upon the earth among 



74 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



all living things, and consider. He is the step- 
child of Nature. 

She cares for every thing else that lives. She 
declines to care for man. She spreads a table 
for the tiger in the jungle, for the buffalo on 
the prairie, for the dragon-fly above the summer 
brook. She clothes the crawling worm, and the 
painted butterfly, alike the white monster of the 
northern seas, and the jewelled bird in southern 
forests. 

Food, covering, shelter, are provided for beast 
and insect, for fowl of the air, and fish of the sea. 
Man is turned out helpless and bare, to scorch or 
freeze, to be lashed by the rain, pelted by the 
hail, burned by the pitiless sun. Material Nature 
faces him as a foe. He lives by fighting her. 
He scars her face with his furrows to make her 
yield him bread ; he tears open her bowels to find 
the tools to master her, the warmth for his hearth 
and the power for his engines ; he ransacks her 
hills and fells her forests to build his home ; he 
drains her marshes, dikes out her seas, walls in 
her rivers, to make his dwelling with her possible. 

And everywhere she resists, and turns a cold, 
mocking, cruel face upon him, till he conquers her. 
Every new land he settles fights him with strange 
diseases, kills him with strange deaths. His 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



75 



march is over the graves of a fallen vanguard. 
Malaria stands guard at all the gates of the 
gardens of the Hesperides, and claims the fore- 
most. " Thorns also and thistles shall the earth 
bring forth to thee." It is the law of the case 
for man. He holds his place by the strong hand. 
The crown of his empire over the material is a 
crown of thorns, and his sceptre is a hammer of 
iron. All tribute is wrested by sheer force of 
blows, by ringing hammer and shattering sledge. 

And the higher he rises, the more he becomes 
manlike, the more bitter is the toil, the fiercer the 
struggle. Where Nature is kindest to him, the 
beast attains his perfection. Where Nature is 
kindest to man, man sinks the lowest. She is in 
her caresses a Delilah to the Samson her lord. 
She shears his locks, and gives him over to the 
Philistines, to grind in their mill, — blind. 

But marked as this difference is between man 
and the animal in their relation to this world, it is 
not the only difference, nor the greatest. 

Nature comes into accord with all other living 
things. She remains at discord with man. Bird, 
beast, and insect lie close and lovingly in the arms 
of the great mother. They are happy. The joy 
of the bird on the bough, of the deer on the 
prairie, of the fish leaping through the flashing 



7 6 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



foam, — the joy of mere living, — fills earth and sky 
and sea. Who has heard the mocking-bird in a 
moonlit night in Mississippi, and has not had born 
in him the sudden revelation of the bird's joy in 
mere living? Acres of air quiver with the ecstasy 
of his notes. The little creature shivers, one is 
conscious, in every fibre with the gladness of its 
own song. Its song and itself are a part of the 
rich harmony of the summer night, like the flood- 
ing moonlight, the snowy drifts of the magnolia- 
blooms, and the musky perfume of the jessamine. 

But summer moonlight, bird's song, perfume 
and shimmer of lovely half-tropic woodlands — 
Ah! yonder rises the roof built by him who owns 
the forest and the green slopes of flowery mead- 
ows ; and beneath its shelter human hearts are 
breaking, and human souls crying out into the 
night. Sorrow, bitter agony, wringing of empty 
hands, appeals to the dumb sky, from the nest 
the lord of all this beauty has built to shelter the 
treasures of his life. 

And Nature sheds no tear for the anguish of 
the man. She is deaf and blind to the broken 
cries of the one creature whom she does not 
understand. She weeps her night dews in bless- 
ing on humble grass-blade and towering oak 
bough. She drops no balm into the parched and 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



77 



tortured soul of man, bending over the coffin of 
his first-born. 

There is a blind wrestling in human nature with 
its environment. Its struggle is not merely a 
struggle for existence, but a struggle to be 
happy in that existence ; in which struggle it 
fails, and fails in precise proportion to its culti- 
vation and its development, to the perfection of 
its manhood. 

It cannot wring happiness out of its surround- 
ings. The attempt to do so is an instinct of the 
animal nature, which experience and reason de- 
clare vain. 

Put an ox in a fat pasture beside a clear stream, 
and the ox is as happy as an ox can be. The 
hungry tiger, with smoking jaws tearing the 
slaughtered buffalo, is happy to the utmost limit 
of tiger-nature. But it is a commonplace of 
human experience, that a man in a palace is no 
happier than a man in a hut. Neither at the 
banquets of Lucullus, nor in the Golden House 
of Nero, does man find content. No people ever 
gathered the spoils of the world to such degree, 
none had its resources of luxury, art, beauty, and 
refinement at such command, none rode upon the 
heights of time in guise so sublime, none were 
lords so irresponsible over the world and its 



78 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



resources, as the Roman patricians of the later 
republic and the earlier empire. 

Mr. Arnold has painted, with a few strong 
strokes, the despair and disgust of the masters of 
the world. 

u In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, 
The Roman noble lay ; 
Then rose and drove, in furious wise, 
Along the Appian Way. 

He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, 
And crowned his head with flowers; 

No easier and no swifter passed 
The impracticable hours. " 

One's thought comes to our own time, where 
there is a wiser and a better grasp of the place 
of lordship and command, and goes over sea to- 
night, where the heir of an empire lies dying, and 
where with darkened heart the daughter of a hun- 
dred kings has been for weary months waiting the 
messenger whom no armed guards can challenge 
and no palace-gates shut out, to summon the 
light of her life, the husband of her youth, from 
her love and a great people's, and to drape her 
soul in the mantle of a lifelong sorrow, and put 
out the lights in imperial halls, and quench the 
house-fires in palaces. 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME, 



79 



Nay, there is a hunger in the heart of man 
which refuses to be satisfied. We advise content, 
but man declines contentment. Never satisfied 
with getting, never pleased with to-day, this 
strange denizen of the world is driven on, rest- 
less, impatient, protesting, under a divine dis- 
content which refuses to be satisfied. 

The moralists tell him he ought to be content. 
The preachers preach that he ought to be con- 
tent. Some of us think, if we were in other 
men's places we would be content, and wonder 
that these others are not. 

But why quarrel with a fact of life ? Why not 
take the fact, rather, and see its meaning ? For, 
like every fact, it has a meaning, if we can find it. 

Why blame a man for not being content with a 
million ? It is enough, you say. Yes, but enough 
for what? If a man has found how to make a 
million honestly, why should he not use his knowl- 
edge, and go on and make another million ? What 
compulsion upon him to be satisfied with a million, 
any more than with one hundred thousand or ten 
thousand ? If it be that he has enough to live 
upon, the answer is plain. To many a man, ten 
thousand or even five thousand would be sufficient, 
as he would use it to supply all his wants. 

But it is not a question of supplying wants. It 



8o 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



is a question of the human constitution. No man 
ever yet was satisfied with getting. Give him 
the United States for an estate, and he would 
want Alaska for a summer residence. Give him 
the whole earth, and he would want the moon for 
an ice-house. He is never content with getting 
money, or what money represents. He is equally 
never content with getting power, fame, or knowl- 
edge. He is insatiable. Why quarrel with him ? 
Why preach threadbare moralities at him ? Every 
acquisition is but the vantage for a new one in 
wealth, honor, or knowledge ; and every success in 
any only reveals the vastness which still remains 
unwon. The richest man living has gathered but 
a poor fragment of the earth's possible wealth ; 
the wisest man, a poor lichen or pebble of its 
possible wisdom ; and the most famous man, but a 
whisper of its fame. Each sees, as others do not 
see, some vision of the dim realms unwon. 

A wise man, many centuries ago, who had at- 
tained in largest measure all that men desire, who 
had tried in all ways known to men to reach con- 
tent and happiness on the earth, and who wrote 

" Marator?7? ixaraiOTrjTitiv — iravra fiar a to rrj 9," as the SUU1 

of all, over crown and palace and human knowl- 
edge and human fame, — gave his solution : " God 
hath set eternity (the world) in their heart. ,, 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 8 1 

For here is this strange fact, that a creature, 
to the outward view and by the outward theory 
a product of the world like all the rest, should live 
his life in a perpetual conflict with the forces 
which produced him, and in a perpetual protest 
against the world and its gifts. 

The point I emphasize is not that he struggles 
merely. It may be said, all other animals do 
that in a way, the struggle of existence, they 
call it. But the peculiarity in the human case 
is, that Nature never gives him success in his 
struggle. He is always winning, but always 
defeated. 

He blasts his way into the earth's treasure- 
stores. He drags them forth, and is not content. 
He sounds her deepest seas, and brings their 
drowned riches to adorn his crown, and is not 
content. He masters her powers, fetters her 
lightning, chains her stored sunlight to his car. 
He finds the hiding-places of her strength, and 
makes it his own, and fights Nature with her own 
arms. He builds to defy her tempests. He 
mocks, in his chambers of comfort, at her bitterest 
cold. He drives his ship into the teeth of her 
hurricanes, sweeps the whirlpools of her roaring 
seas, and carries the harvest of his victories to 
every haven. He lords it over matter now right 



82 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



royally, and with a sceptre which gives pledge 
over vaster fields. 

And the point is, that all these victories are 
barren, as far as his earthly life goes. His rela- 
tion to Nature is one utterly alone. He protests 
that all is fruitless, though he rises for the fight 
to-morrow. He is led by illusions, and toils for 
phantoms. For all past success has not made 
human life one whit more in accord or content 
with its environment. It is all vanity and vexa- 
tion still, and we can give no promise that it 
ever will be otherwise. The entire discovery of 
Nature's secrets, the entire mastery of her powers, 
would leave, we are bound to believe from all 
experience and deduction, man just as restless, as 
full of sorrow and of care, as ever. 

We are compelled by reason and common-sense 
to find a place in any theory of life for this fact. 

We find it in this, as it seems to me : that man 
is under process of development ; that, such pro- 
cess being temporary, it is impossible it should 
ever bring content ; that while the perfection of 
every other living creature after its kind may be 
reached by its development upon this earth, man 
does not reach his, is not meant to reach it, and 
is forever driven onwards by necessity, or lured 
onwards by illusions, until when the earthly end 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



83 



comes he is still unsatisfied and incomplete. 
And we are driven, as it were, by our innate 
sense of the fitness of things, to declare that this 
temporary discipline is only a preparation for a 
development to come. 

His development in that which makes his per- 
fection as a man is not physical. Strength, swift- 
ness, mere physical power in any direction, is not 
advance for man. At some loss of these he wins 
his road. His heroes are not physical giants, 
his world-conquerors and kings of men have not 
been marked for animal power. It is down 
among the savages that we find leaders chosen for 
their power of arm. The higher man rises, the 
more victorious he becomes as man, the less mere 
thews and sinews count, — the more will stead- 
fastness, moral courage, high sense of rectitude 
and honor, count. The perfection of his breeding 
lies on no parallel line with that of ox-breeding or 
swine-breeding. 

His development is not upon physical lines at 
all. And he closes his life with a development 
incomplete, and which the environment about him 
so far is quite incapable of helping farther. 

For the ideal of a perfect horse, which we hold 
in thought, there are all the elements of realization 
complete in this world. The means are all here. 



8 4 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



For the development of a perfect man, the 
means are just as evidently not here. No man 
ever yet lived, save One, who other men do not 
plainly see was poorly developed and incomplete, 
measured by our ideal ; wanting in intellect, and 
wanting in moral power, — the development spe- 
cial and peculiar to man. 

What can we say, save that the development 
is only begun here ? This unique being, pro- 
testing and warring at every step with his envi- 
ronment, is led on step by step by the promises of 
a morrow which never comes, — is driven on step 
by step, by a relentless destiny, to the end. 

The fable of the Wandering Jew is a parable of 
human life. Still incomplete, and knowing him- 
self incomplete, only the beginning of what he 
might be, — the germ only of a possible manhood, 
— he comes to the door that opens out into the 
dark. He comes under protest. In every age 
and in every condition, he makes that protest. 
He is conscious that he is incomplete ; his yearn- 
ing for immortality, which some explain as only 
an egoistic conceit, is the declaration of his sense 
of incompleteness, — the common prophecy, in 
every germ, of its future. 

Shall we stop with the grave and the burial, — 
"dust to dust," and so the end? It is dust to 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



85 



dust, and ashes to ashes. The Church of God has 
chanted the words over every coffin. So far, she 
and agnostic science sing the same anthem. The 
accord is perfect. But Science turns dumb in 
this crisis, as she does in so many others. 

While the tears fall, and the sobs relieve the 
burdened hearts around the grave, and the clods 
drop on the coffin, she might suggest the advan- 
tages of cremation, and so cheer the mourners ; 
but I am not aware of any thing else she could 
say, or any thing else she pretends to say. 

She has been dealing with an animal, in her 
blind persistency against facts which have chal- 
lenged her at every turn. She has gotten her 
animal buried; and there is positively nothing 
more for her to say, except to stare round upon 
the mourners with her big owl-eyes, and deliver 
a lecture on the best way to dispose of the re- 
mains ! Exceedingly comforting to the mourners, 
you say ? Well, you see, Science takes no account 
of mourners. That these hearts are breaking, 
and these souls are clothed in darkness for all 
their days on earth, is not within the scope of 
"Science." It is her business to find out the 
number of inches an Alpine glacier moves in a 
year, exactly, or the number of vibrations a mole- 
cule of protoplasm makes each minute in the 



86 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME, 



spike of a nettle ! Those tremendous facts, and 
not human grief nor human heart-break, are the 
important things for the study of mankind ! 

For, poor thing, she is very cowardly, very 
easily scared. 

What has become of the man ? The dust is not 
the man. The ashes are not the man. We bury 
these, or burn these, or sink them in the sea. 
What matter ? But where is the man gone, — 
the brother, the father, the son, the husband ? 
Where is the intellect, the force of thought, the 
will to master, the rapid vision to see, the clear 
reason to announce, the judgment to guide and 
control, the truth, the love, the tenderness, the 
whole power that made the man we knew and 
loved and mourn ? 

Why cannot even Science venture on the road 
of common-sense so far as to say, according to 
her own doctrine, " These have not perished. No 
force is destructible. In some form it always is. 
That force you knew and loved, which blessed 
and upheld and enlightened, is not dead, — can- 
not be dead. Somewhere, somehow, I cannot 
tell you where nor how, it lives, and must live 
forever." 

But we who stand about the sodded grave hear, 
from the deeps beyond the stars, a voice fall 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



87 



through the silence : "I am the Resurrection and 
the Life." 

And we say to scared Science, " We are not 
afraid, in this extremity, to declare our faith in 
your own doctrine, to which revelation gives cohe- 
rence and a purpose." 

The man I loved, whose body lies under this 
red mound, was, I know, and he knew, but the 
poor beginnings of his possibilities. Strong brain, 
true vision, kind heart, — he was all that, and to 
me far more. God-loving and man-loving, he did 
a brave day's work here, and helped his fellows 
well. 

But he had only started. None knew it better 
than he. And is this the end ? These green 
leaves from the sprouted acorn ! Is the acorn 
developed ? Yes, I should say so, had I never 
seen an oak. Having seen an oak, I know better. 
Having read the Gospels, I know the man I 
mourn has only begun to grow. 

The human mind is incapable of imagining a 
more grotesque absurdity than this grave, if this 
grave holds my friend. The universe turns in 
Titanic laughter, and jeers and mocks with all 
its infinite voices, at the comedy of human life, 
and the farce of human pain and human death. 

If there be reason in the universe at all, — and I 



88 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



take it that the reason in man will always compel 
him to believe in a reason in the universe, — then 
one is driven to admit that the ultimate develop- 
ment of human nature must be looked for out- 
side this world, and beyond this life. 

There is no escape in reason, I dare to say, 
from the conclusion. There is no escape in 
science. The law, let us admit, is the law of 
development. Here is one creature, found upon 
the earth, and, we admit, developing upon it. 
The higher he grows, the more completely he 
develops, the less does he find his environment 
helps him. The more his disgust increases, the 
more his contempt for its pleasures or its pains, 
the more his conviction that the one and the 
other are folly to his reason, and abject to his 
demands. 

So day by day he plods a weary road, to which 
there is no ending. As he grows more and more 
into manhood, and leaves the beast and the 
beast's wants more behind him, as he becomes 
more and more master and lord, — so more and 
more does his discontent, his contempt, and his 
hunger grow. 

It is not Christian experience only : it is Stoic 
experience, Buddhist experience, all experience 
where the human asserts itself, where that which 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



8 9 



differentiates man from the beast is strongest and 
clearest. In the highest types it rises, and some- 
times asserts itself in very strange fashion, in 
contempt for the environment, for the world and 
all it holds, and all it can give or refuse. Satiated 
with its pleasures, its honors, its wealth, its 
power, the man asserts his manhood by proclaim- 
ing all sometimes a fraud, or a folly, and asking 
from the heights of power, of knowledge, or of 
enjoyment, " Is life worth living ? " 

And the rational answer is, "No." If this be 
al}, life is a grotesque absurdity. 

The only conclusion which can give coherency 
to the riddle is that man on earth, developed to 
his highest, is but a germ of what man is to be- 
come in other conditions. Hungry-hearted, sore 
burdened, weary and worn, he is driven step by 
step through life to its ending. 

The simulacrum of him, the organic construc- 
tion which gave him connection and partnership 
with the material life, dissolves. 

But the dead man of this life, as St. Paul said 
long ago, is the planted seed of another man, to 
develop in another life. So far the earth has 
done for him, and stops. As far as he is con- 
cerned, its powers are ended. She passes the 
germ over into new conditions, — into the land of 



90 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 

eternal realities and the environment of the 
infinites. 

Driven to the door, protesting, sick, weary, 
beaten, though victor, he waits the opening of 
the awful valves, and passes through into the 
dimness, — dimness to faith even, folded curtains 
of darkness to science. 

But in every land, among every people, he 
passes with the human instinct of another life. 

Shall we say he alone of all creatures shall 
come to no issue ? have no completeness ? never 
reach the vision of himself ? never be what every 
thrill of brain and nerve has suggested he might 
be? Shall he be the one gigantic joke of all the 
world, — the noH-seqiiititr of the universe ? 

Revelation flames its torch across the darkness, 
where human knowledge leaves us, but makes no 
contradiction in that knowledge, and reveals 
nothing which that knowledge can call inconse- 
quential or irrational. 

"This man that has passed," it cries, "beyond 
your ken, but not beyond mine, lives. He has 
grown so far, in the world down here. He has not 
been lost in the passage where you saw him not. 
Centre of life and power, by the endowment 
of the Maker, he has entered upon a new develop- 
ment under a new environment. His infinite 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 9 1 



longings are satisfied now with the infinite. His 
restlessness finds rest in eternal endeavor; his 
energies, in eternal work ; his satisfaction, never 
granted him here, in eternal success in the work. 

"There he will become a very man, and the 
delusive vision of his earthly years will be ful- 
filled. To what heights or depths he will attain, 
you cannot tell, nor can I ; but being one of the 
Lord's servants, he will become a genuine man, 
and more and more the likeness of the Man who 
is also God. There is endless advance, and pure 
joy in the advance forevermore, rest in ceaseless 
work, content in ceaseless endeavor. ' We know 
not what he shall be ' at any point ; but always 
we know he will be a man, and always more and 
more a man forever." 

The light that falls on the graves where we lay 
the dear dust of our dead pales not before the 
lamp of human science. It flames and flashes on 
the marble of every tomb, from the open sepul- 
chre in the garden of the man of Arimathaea. 

We make no apology for its existence. While 
we look with tear-climmed eyes on dead faces 
which yet are luminous in that unearthly light, we 
feel that our hope is not irrational, that we and 
they are not all of the earth, that the land from 
which that " daylight of eternal glory " falls is our 



9 2 



THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 



land as well as this. We are not unscientific, we 
believe, in holding what the faith reveals, that the 
dead-seeming germs of the earth may spring to 
life and grow and blossom in the airs of Paradise, 
and that this world may turn over, after its own 
abject failure, the perfect outcome of all its de- 
velopment, the crown of all its possibilities, to 
other, vaster worlds, and other, grander, and 
more awful conditions, as a germ to be developed 
to a growth unattained and unattainable here, and 
yet always prophesied as possible. 

But let us step out of the twilight, into the 
enveloping splendors of the faith revealed. 

"The whole creation groaneth and travaileth 
in pain together until now." 

Out of the pain, out of the writhings, out of the 
sobs and cries of the dying Old, shall the eternal 
New be born. It is the law of the revelation, it is 
the law of nature. It is on the pages of the Bible, 
of human history, of the rock-ledges of the earth. 
And " I am the Resurrection and the Life," saith 
the Son of God. He was also the Son of man. 



LECTURE IV. 
THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 



What think ye of CJirist ? Whose soti is he ? 

Matt. xxii. 



LECTURE IV. 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 
EARLY nineteen hundred years ago, lying in 



^ the feeding-trough of an Eastern khan, some 
shepherds found at midnight the new-born child 
of a Jewish artisan's young wife. 

There are always vast possibilities in childhood. 
You cannot tell what may be the growth from 
any new - prepared cradle. The sages and the 
heroes, the leaders and the lords of men, have all 
lain in swaddling-clothes — as have the tyrants 
and the greatly evil, the criminals, the misleaders 
and the destroyers of men. 

The cry of the child is the proclamation of a 
new day. God rules by men, makes and unmakes 
the ages by men ; and when the man-child is born, 
all is possible. The mother croons over the world's 
teacher or the world's master, sings her lullaby 
over the guide of a hundred generations, over the 
lord of a thousand legions — who can tell ? All 
things are possible when the child is born. 




95 



9 6 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 



Every philosophy, every religion, every discov- 
ery, every government, has slept in the cradle 
with some child. The babe in swaddling-clothes 
is the germ-seed of all power on earth. 

Even in sending His own Son into the world, 
we Christians confess, God sends him, to all 
appearance, as He sends other helpers, guides, and 
deliverers of men. His common way of working, 
God never drops needlessly. The Son of God 
does not come with blare of trumpet, and clash 
of cymbal, and the tramp of attending legions. 
That is not God's method upon the earth. Only 
to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, 
does the star shine and do the angels sing. To 
outward seeming, the Eternal Son sleeps as any 
child may sleep under a mother's watch, and 
His cradle-song is the familiar song of Judaean 
mothers. 

Yet that cradle in the khan at Bethlehem 
sways the world. Augustus is the echo of a 
name, hollow-sounding on the blasts of the dim 
years. The Child in Bethlehem is the mightiest 
living present force on earth ; and millions of the 
vanguard of mankind bend round that cradle, as 
the centre of the world's life and their own, across 
the vast spaces and the long years. 

The Child of Bethlehem was a germ then. God 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 97 



works, in the revelation of Himself and the salva- 
tion of the world, as He works in other things, 
concerning men, at least. We recognize the 
eternal method and the eternal wisdom in the 
Babe come to save a world. "The kingdom of 
God cometh not with observation." 

But how to account for Jesus of Bethlehem, — 
Jesus Christ of Nazareth ? Can you account for 
any ultimate germ ? Science is dumb on ulti- 
mates. It traces up causes from effects, link by 
link of the long chain. At last one link is 
reached, and beyond there is nothing. Omne exit 
in tnysterium. The last step is into the profound. 
But is the end reached ? Are there no causes 
and no consequences beyond the touch of mate- 
rial hand and the sight of material eye ? 

We can account for other men by things upon 
the earth : can we account for Jesus Christ ? Is 
He a product of the earth, and can we find that 
out of which He grew ? Is He, like other men, 
a development from visible sources ? Is He 
explainable by sufficient causes ? 

All other men are. In a most true sense, every 
man is a development. Let Him be as exceptional 
as you will, He is the natural product of natural 
causes upon which you may lay your finger. 

Plato is as genuine a Greek product as the 



9 8 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 



Parthenon. Under no other sky could the one 
have grown, or the other been builded. 

Men are the result of race, nationality, culture, 
hereditary tendencies, and so on, in the making of 
their characters, — the kind of men they come to 
be. One can generally, after due examination, 
discover and lay down the causes of the develop- 
ment into such a shape. 

William Shakspeare, exceptional as is his vast 
genius, is an Englishman in every fibre, just as 
natural a product of English soil and English air, 
as an English oak or an English daisy. There 
are causes sufficient, if not to account for his 
exceptional genius, quite enough to account for 
the form that genius took, for his whole moral 
make-up and tendencies, for his character and his 
influence. Of all the lands on earth, we are sure 
England alone could have given him birth. 

And not only England, but England at a par- 
ticular time. He is a man of his country, but 
also a man of his day ; a product of his race, but 
a product at a particular point in its development. 
He is an Elizabethan Englishman. He belongs 
where Spenser, Bacon, and Raleigh belong. He 
has the common stamp of the great Queen upon 
him, as they all have. Before or after there could 
have been no Shakspeare, as there has not been. 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 99 

Only when "the tawny lioness " held her island 
lair secure, could William Shakspeare have lived 
and written. 

I name another name on the roll of poetic fame, 
the only one perhaps to be named beside him ; 
his to whom the little children pointed as the man 
"who had been in hell !" the awful soul who trod 
the hills of Paradise and the dread profound of 
the abyss, and sung the story of what he saw 
for the hearing of all time, — Dante. We can, 
again, account for him. He is a natural product 
of his race and time. He is an Italian, and of all 
Italy an Italian of Florence, and of Florence in 
the thirteenth century. 

Take the exceptional and representative man of 
any name, and he is always clearly an outcome. 
Voltaire is a French, Goethe a German. George 
Washington is a natural outcome of Saxon and 
Norman England, — the representative of a race 
of independent, God-fearing English gentlemen 
and Churchmen, transplanted into the American 
Colonies, but into one special colony, Virginia. 

You see what I mean, and also why we nat- 
urally, I might almost say instinctively, turn to 
the examination of the causes which have pro- 
duced any special character, and expect to find 
them. They may, indeed, themselves be the 



IOO THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 

germs of great consequences, the original sources 
of vast results ; but they are not ultimates. They 
have their own causes on the earth, and are but 
single links in the vast chain which stretches 
backward into the unknown past, as it does on- 
ward into the unknown future. 

Is it thus with Jesus Christ ? 

And here, mark, Jesus Christ was expected. It 
is his own claim, that he was expected ; that he 
was the fulfilment of the expectations of thirty 
centuries ; that he was looked for, longed for, 
prayed for. No other man ever was expected. 
Christ is singular in this. 

The literature of a whole people is filled with 
an expected man. Indeed, on close examination, 
the expectation of a man is the central meaning 
of that literature. The kind of man desired is 
clearly laid down. There is no place either to 
doubt the character of him who was to be the 
culmination, the splendid blossom, of a long his- 
tory and a nation's epic. The ideal is magnifi- 
cent, and it is also distinct. 

It is the vision of all the seers, the proclama- 
tion of all the prophets. It begins at the gate of 
Paradise, with the seed that tramples on the 
serpent ; grows clearer to Abraham and Jacob ; 
distinctly defines itself to Moses ; is sung by David 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. IOI 



to his lyre ; in Solomon's great temple, swells in 
magnificent chant upon the incense-laden air, 
while the trumpets peal, and the harp-strings 
quiver in the chorus. Amid the ruins of the 
temple and the city, the expected man is still the 
burden of Isaiah's song ; and his splendid com- 
ing flames afar through Jeremiah's tears. In 
captivity, by the waters of Babylon, still the 
man is expected. And the literature of a whole 
people ends where it begins, with a prophecy of 
his quick coming, and the manner of his appear- 
ance. Malachi closes the Book. It is still the 
old story. " The Lord whom ye seek shall sud- 
denly come to his temple, even the messenger 
of the covenant, whom ye delight in ; he shall 
come, saith the Lord of hosts." 

It is this that gives a peculiar character to the 
Old Testament. It is a national literature, re- 
member. It is unique in this, — that it is a 
literature of hope. It is always looking on, and 
the vision it beholds is never dimmed by any 
vapors of the lower atmosphere. 

When Babylon falls, no Chaldaean sage stands 
among the ruins to prophesy in stately strains 
of a new Babylon, and a new and wiser Chalclaea. 
When Rome falls, no voice in Forum or Senate- 
house, no orator, no poet, tells or sings of a newer 



102 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER, 

Rome to be built upon the ruins of the old. 
Only a voice from far away, trained in the cadences 
of Hebrew speech, — a Christian voice, — St. 
Augustine's, chants the grand epic of the City 
of God, and is not drowned in the crash of an 
empire thundering to the dust. 

But when Jerusalem falls, Isaiah, and Jeremiah 
while he breaks his heart in lamentation, stand 
amid the ruins of city and temple, and in a land 
made desolate, and sing triumphantly of a new 
Israel, a new and eternal temple, another David 
and another Solomon who shall reign forever. 
The fringes of the darkness of the day of blood 
and smoke are luminous with the glory of the 
eternal day that waits behind the far-off hills for 
its full arising. 

All other races have dreamed of a golden age, 
but their golden age lay behind. Themselves 
walk upon an earth of iron, under a heavens of 
brass. Things had been growing worse and 
worse since the splendid dawning, and shall 
grow worse and worse until the last crash and 
final wreck of time and hope. 

But the Old Testament always places the 
golden age before. The great Day of the Lord, 
in gloom or glory, is a day coming. It waits 
behind all temporal shadows. Whatever else 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 



103 



fails, it shall not fail. The best is yet to come. 
The brightest is yet to dawn. And so the nation 
in its darkest hour of failure, in defeat, in captiv- 
ity, in ruin uttermost to outward seeming, never 
despairs. Its wailing litanies by the waters of 
Babylon, burst at last into chants of victorious 
anticipation; and their refrain is, " Glory to the 
Lord who redeemeth Israel." 

And so this nation never dies. All others 
crumble to the dust, — the proudest and the 
strongest. Vanquished or victor, Israel lives, and 
lives yet, scattered and peeled, but somehow vital, 
virile, persistent. Israel is the heir of hope, the 
race that always looked forward. 

And the man expected is a Prince, a Conqueror, 
a Deliverer. He comes in might. He comes 
with joy, he comes with terror. "Who may abide 
the day of his coming? Who shall stand when he 
appeareth?" "A refiner and purifier of silver." 
By the red furnace-mouth he sits, and the white 
flame leaps and glows ; and there in the fierce 
blinding heat he tries the souls of men. 

Surely the brooding of three thousand years 
shall bring its birth. Surely a nation's long 
yearning after its ideal shall see the ideal real- 
ized. If there be power in ancestral desire, in 
hereditary type, in the fixed conception of the 



104 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 

generations, we shall know the man when he 
comes, and say, " Out of a race's throes this 
man was born. He bears the marks of his de- 
scent. The race has stamped him for its own, 
and acknowledges its son, — the son of its heart, 
and its long desire." 

And is this the outcome ? This Child the 
shepherds find in the cattle-trough ? Does the 
vision of ages end in this ? a nation's hopes fulfil 
themselves here ? 

Do you wonder " His own received Him not " ? 
I say He claims to be the one expected, and lo ! 
He is denied. " He hath no form nor comeliness, 
that" they " should desire Him." The verdict of 
the race was, that He was not a development from 
any thing among them. They declined to recog- 
nize Him as any product of their religion or their 
prophecy. He was a blank disappointment. And 
above all men they ought to have known. 

The way all connected with His coming flatly 
contradict the expectation He came, according to 
Himself, to fulfil, is surely startling. He seems as 
if he set Himself directly against all that was con- 
ceived of Him, or said about Him. The angels 
sang, " Peace on earth, good-will to men." Within 
a few days, in consequence of His birth, the 
mothers of Bethlehem were wailing over their 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 105 

murdered babes. And when He comes to teach, 
he declares, " I am not come to send peace, but a 
sword." 

It is surely, on any but His own explanation, 
a very curious thing this, — that, claiming to be 
the Messiah, He flatly refuses to be the Messiah of 
the whole race's conception, and is a Messiah after 
an utterly new type and model, without existence 
in the national consciousness. 

There can be no clearer way of declaring that 
He declines to be held the product of such con- 
sciousness. He has no mark or likeness of it. 
As far as that consciousness goes, He is entirely 
new. He is not rooted in, does not spring from, 
it, or grow out of it, — is in all ways alien. 

But if the age long yearning for a particular 
type had no result in this Man, if three thousand 
years of intense national character and national 
desire cannot account for the Man who claimed 
to fulfil that character and be that desire, can 
the existing national character and condition at 
the time account for Him as its result ? 

His environment is distinct enough. The 
national influence into which He was born was 
one of the most powerful and well-marked ever 
known. Is there any thing in it to account for 
Jesus of Nazareth ? 



I06 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 

There was intense race prejudice and coherence. 
The Jew was a narrow, isolated man, who would 
neither dwell nor eat with any not a Jew. All 
other men were counted alien from his sympathy 
or association. Could the Man who told the 
story of the Good Samaritan — and the Samari- 
tans were most hated and despised — be the 
product of the Jewish feeling of his time ? 

And their religion. It had a profound formative 
influence upon character, none ever stronger or 
more profound. Out of which of its rabbinical 
schools come the words, "But I say unto you, 
Love your enemies ; bless them which curse you ; 
pray for them which despitefully use you " ? 

That religion had reduced itself in His day, and 
indeed long before, to a perfunctory observance of 
outward ceremonies. It had formulated a shrewd 
casuistry, by which it proposed to keep the law in 
the letter, and break it in the spirit. From birth 
to death a man was surrounded by its mechanism, 
and his whole life was fettered by its minute 
rigidity of ceremony out of which the soul had 
long since fled. 

Whence came the word, "The hour cometh 
when ye shall neither in Jerusalem nor yet in this 
mountain worship the Father. God is a Spirit, 
and they that worship Him must worship Him 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 107 

in spirit and in truth " ? Or this : " It is the spirit 
that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth nothing" ? Or 
this : " The kingdom of God is within you " ? 

Nay, one need not dwell upon the wonderful 
differences. I am aware that there are those who 
have claimed to find Christianity in the Talmud. 
Unhappily for the fancy, the Talmud is far too 
recent for the purpose. What we know is the 
character of the practical Judaism when Christ 
came, and we know also the judgment of the 
people and the people's leaders, of the common 
folk and the priesthood and the teachers ; and 
both agreed that instead of Christ's doctrine and 
character being a natural outgrowth of Judaism, 
they were so great a contradiction and outrage 
upon it, that the inevitable end for them was : 
"We found this fellow perverting the nation. 
Away with him ! crucify him ! " Far better than 
any scholar, of whatsoever name, brought up in 
a Christian atmosphere with Christian influences 
all about him, did the men of his own day know 
whether Christ Jesus was a natural product of the 
national sentiment and the race faith. 

His life was spent wholly in Judaea. There is 
no record, not even a suspicion, of His having 
been subjected to any other than Israelitish in- 
fluences. He was, like His great apostle, a 



I08 THE CHILD /AT THE MANGER. 

Hebrew of the Hebrews ; but not like him a 
Roman citizen, and a man trained in Greek phi- 
losophy. 

But, admitting it possible that Roman and 
Greek influences were in the air, can one or both 
together account for Jesus of Nazareth ? 

There is no mistake possible about the outcome 
of Greek thought, or the character that Greek in- 
fluence would form. There was the worship of 
beauty in sculpture, painting, or literary expres- 
sion ; the passionate search for, and admiration of, 
clear human thinking and its expression. "The 
Greeks seek after wisdom. " There was the pride 
of culture, and the confidence in human reason ; 
and a contempt for the uncultured, the barbarians, 
in fit ratio. 

Is this word from the Academy or the Porch ? 
" Blessed are the meek ; blessed are the poor in 
spirit ; blessed are they that mourn.'' 

One can scarce imagine any thing more foreign 
to Greek thought and Greek philosophy, than the 
whole teaching and the whole life of Christ. 
Whatever else may be said of Him, the slightest 
knowledge of the question compels one to say 
this man was no Greek. 

Was he a Roman ? Born in the Roman Empire 
he was, and about Him were the Roman laws and 



THE CHTLD IN THE MANGER. IO9 

the Roman arms. Was He a product of the mighty 
force that built the seven-hilled mistress of the 
world, and ruled the nations at her feet ? 

There was formative power enough in the Ro- 
man national character. No more mighty force in 
moulding men after one type ever existed, and the 
type is unmistakable. The echoing tramp of 
the legions shakes Europe. The Roman stamps 
himself for all time wherever his foot treads. He 
is "the lord of things," the law-maker and the 
law-executor. Iron-handed, iron-hearted, he goes 
everywhere, to trample down, break in pieces, and 
compel peoples to his obedience. His pride is 
beyond weakness. It is sublime. He meets no 
superior on earth. He scarce acknowledges a su- 
perior in the heavens. He and his race and his 
city, his senate, his legions, and his laws, are 
a part of the fixed order of the universe, and 
eternal. 

"Blessed are the peacemakers.' , Is that word 
an echo from the Senate-Chamber or the shouting 
Forum ? " He that is greatest among you shall 
be your servant." "The Son of man came not 
to be served, but to serve." Can one imagine 
words more utterly against every Roman concep- 
tion of human life and fitting human opinion ? 
And the manner of the life, and the end of the 



no 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 



life, both outrage every Roman sentiment of 
duty, fitness, and human dignity. 

By the law of the case, there must be cause 
sufficient to explain every man. He is what he is, 
from sufficient power to make him so. He is a 
product. Heredity, environment, and the rest 
make him. But when you try the law on this 
Man, it fails. The human intellect is challenged 
to explain Him by the known methods of making 
men. He has no race-mark. He bears no birth- 
mark. Intellectually, morally, he is like his 
shadowy type in the elder day, — Melchizedek, 
" without father, without mother, without descent, 
having neither beginning of days nor end of life/' 
He stands in lonely majesty a Man, simply the 
Son of man as He called Himself, the type of the 
race as it should be, with no narrower character 
upon Him than manhood ; so infinite a manhood, 
that Jew and Greek and Roman accept him as 
their Brother and their King, that savage man and 
civilized man, black man and white, the man of 
Jerusalem and the man of New York, alike recog- 
nize Him as their vision of human perfection, of 
human beauty, wisdom, goodness, and power. 

He is of no race, therefore he is of all. And 
each sees in him his own. The painters are our 
witnesses. The Italian, filled with his conception 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. Ill 



of the perfect humanity, paints an Italian Christ ; 
the German, putting his ideal upon canvas, paints 
a German Christ ; and the English painter makes 
the face looking down upon you an English face. 
Even the poor village artist of Central America, 
working with pigments from the leaves and roots 
of the forest, to make a picture for the rude parish 
church, will paint an Aztec Christ. 

Jesus Christ is Himself, then, one of the ulti- 
mate producing forces. We are driven back to 
that. The Child in the manger is an ultimate 
germ ; the Seed itself, as He is the Branch ; the 
Root of Jesse and of David. " If David calleth 
Him Lord, how is He then his Son?" We can 
answer : — 

Into the realm of the natural, a new force was 
born that night in Bethlehem. The Divine en- 
tered upon the plane of the human. No other 
explanation is adequate to the, facts. 

But Nature is God's ; the human is God's ; and 
even here the new force and life, in coming, comes 
as God works in the realm of His appearing. He 
comes not as a man crowned with power, or 
laurelled with wisdom, triumphantly entering on 
his career. He comes, the new life of men, as a 
germ out of which light, life, and salvation shall 
develop. It is in strict accord with all we learn 



112 THE CHILD IX THE MAXGER, 



from God's working, that He should come as a 
child, and be found in the cradle. The small hands 
hold the earth. The small manger contains the 
seed to sow the world for all time, — the seed and 
the sower both. But only they that have eyes see 
the Child ; only the scientific intelligence sees the 
oak of centuries in the small acorn at one's feet. 

But while the revelation is that of an ultimate 
germ, which has no cause nor antecedent in time 
or matter, — the beginning of a new life for man 
upon the earth, — and while, upon examination, 
reason accords with revelation, the same revelation 
shows again that the environment of the germ, so 
to speak, the place and soil and circumstances, 
were what we call natural developments of the 
earth ; that is, they are such part of God's working 
as we can see and note, and draw inferences about, 
which is what we mean and all we mean by 
natural. 

For this Child was born in the fulness of time, 
at a particular period and in a particular place, 
when the world was ready for him, and the devel- 
opment might begin. 

To speak in the tongue of our time, the environ- 
ment was prepared by natural development for 
the new germ, while the germ itself was a new 
seed, to begin a new era. 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. I I 3 

And why should one stumble at this ? Human 
history is not a succession of accidents. There 
is a law in the story. Things grow from one 
another, and events have natural beginning, and 
a reasonable course and end, if we can but find it. 

It is this that philosophic history seeks to 
trace, else the story is a mere bundle of dates. 
You make a chronology, and a chronology is not 
a history. 

The story moves upon its various lines, and the 
lines converge and focus themselves in some out- 
come, some crisis ; an ending of the old, a begin- 
ning of the new ; the fruit of one series, the germ 
of another ; an ending and yet a beginning. 

So Church historians have shown us how the 
past gathered itself into one present, for the 
coming of the Lord. And they are right and 
scientific. But He, as we have seen, is not the 
outcome. That outcome is the world preparing 
itself and making ready for the cry, " Behold, the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand. ,, 

For that day all Jewish history had been look- 
ing and waiting. The nation, in its slavery in 
Egypt, in its wandering in the desert, in its 
conquest of the land promised, and in its peace 
and rest under Solomon, in its splendors and 
its decay alike, had been preparing. Moses gave 



114 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 

the law for it, Joshua conquered the Canaanites 
for it, David fought and Solomon ruled that it 
might come. And over all the world the people 
were scattered, and their land was a Roman prov- 
ince, that Moses might be " preached in every 
city," and that the synagogues might be ready 
for the first preaching of the faith. 

At no time as at this time, — before certainly 
not, and after certainly not, — was the situation 
of Israel such as to make the preaching of the 
gospel to all nations effectual from itself as a 
basis. But now everywhere throughout the em- 
pire, in Rome as in Corinth or Alexandria, was 
the idea of a one unseen, eternal, and only God, 
to be worshipped without image, altar, or bloody 
sacrifice, made common among polytheists and 
idolaters. The synagogue worship, uncommanded 
in, extraneous to, the Scriptures, seems to have its 
Divine authority sufficiently in this, — that every- 
where it was holding up its testimony of the 
Divine oneness, and that God is a Spirit, to be 
worshipped in spirit, and that so the synagogue 
stood ready for the apostle when he came to 
complete the testimony by preaching that " God 
hath revealed Himself in His Son." 

But not Israel only had been guided for this, 
and in this its story made coherent, purposeful. 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 1 1 5 

Babylon rose for this, and fell ; and Nineveh, 
and Tyre and Sidon, and Tadmor in the wilder- 
ness. And in the dark, unnoticed, by the Tiber, 
the outlaws built their first rude fortification, 
and founded Rome. And slowly, still unknown 
to the great Oriental peoples, the germ so planted 
grew. The little tribal wars, so insignificant in 
themselves, were fought. The kings were ex- 
pelled, and the Republic made its consuls. The 
whole story of the building of Rome unfolds 
itself in battles, intrigues, struggles ot leaders, 
writhings and fierce pains of the people, — a very 
wolf's litter, bloody and hungry on the prey, — 
till out of all comes the great, strong, masterful 
people, who, " dreadful and terrible and strong 
exceedingly/' lorded it over a submissive world. 

For their laws had grown, and their order and 
discipline, and a certain conception of life as a 
place of duty and labor. There had grown, 
amidst all the cruelty and wrong, some types of 
manful character, of strong, righteous men, of 
pure, faithful women. Noble examples stand all 
along the story ; and, like all other peoples, they 
got their day's wages, — the thing they had 
worked for and deserved. 

But is the end of all Rome's splendid story to 
be the later Caesars, and the overwhelming rush 



Il6 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 

of the barbarians ? Had Rome no purpose ? 
Did the she-wolfs litter roam the earth for 
naught ? Nay, we dare to say, the purpose of 
Rome was a divine purpose, and the great empire 
was built on the foundation, laid in mire and dark- 
ness, and the sweat and blood of men, for the 
new Kingdom of God. 

The great roads ran from the city to the 
empire's bounds, that St. Paul might travel swiftly 
to preach the gospel. The Mediterranean was 
whitened with the sails of the ships, that the 
story might be carried by the winds and the 
waves. One power ruled, that under its shadow 
there might be protection ; for even an apostle 
to fulfil his purpose might need to say, " Civis 
Romanus sum" and appeal to Caesar. 

And when persecution should come, as it was 
sure to come, fierce and exterminating, there 
was a limit even to its madness in the fact that 
the persecution, after all, was in a land of law, and 
must be conducted under forms ot law. Christi- 
anity might have been exterminated in Rome as 
it was in Persia, except that the bloodiest Roman 
emperor was still a constitutional ruler, and there 
were laws which even a Nero or a Tiberius could 
not always trample on. The forms of law and 
the sacred Roman right stood between the perse- 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 117 

cutor and the victim ; and Christians could not, 
behind them, be slain so fast as Christians were 
made. 

To make the world ready for the Child in the 
manger, and what the Child should bring, the 
legions marched, and the pro-consuls ruled, 
the Senate decreed, the augurs looked for the 
auspices, the " Twelve Gods' stood in marble 
silence behind their altars. 

For this, Pompey conquered the East ; for this, 
"the foremost man of all the world" shook the 
German forests and the far-off shores of Britain 
with the onset of the invincible arms ; for this, 
Augustus ruled with all his political cunning ; for 
this, he decreed that "all the world should be 
taxed," — for this : that the Child should be born 
in Bethlehem, be cradled in the manger of the 
crowded khan, and die, at last, a Roman death, 
under a Roman indictment, by the cross, and not 
a Jewish death by stoning. 

But Roman preparation was not enough, even 
in its ripeness. The hour waits till Rome has not 
only done her own work, but absorbed the work 
of others, reaching her own crisis, gathering into 
herself the past. 

Not peace only, and an ordered world, and the 
settled facilities of intercourse over vast spaces, 



Il8 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 

among the men of three continents, were needed 
for the carriage and the spread of the world's new 
story from the manger ; but a language in which 
to tell it, a universal tongue spoken in Asia, in 
Africa, in Europe, in Marseilles, in Alexandria, 
in Jerusalem, and in Rome, — a language of com- 
mon intercourse in the mart and on the quay, that 
common men might hear, and yet a language so 
developed by orator and poet and philosopher that 
it might fitly hold this most wondrous of all 
stories, and convey the spiritual power it in- 
folded. 

The Roman had no word for repentance, no 
word for Saviour, none for the Anointed Himself. 
He did not repent, the stern materialist, the stoic 
of time. He needed no Saviour. The pilum and 
the short-sword should save him, or he died. His 
tongue was barren of spiritual power. It must 
be converted itself before it could say the alpha- 
bet of the Child. 

The Roman must absorb Greece before he 
found a language for the good news of Bethlehem. 

And there the language waited for St. Paul at 
Athens, for the Gospel of St. John, for the plain 
though hesitating pen of St. Peter. 

The richest and most wonderful tongue ever 
spoken among men receives into its most perma- 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. Iig 

nent literature, and as the choicest treasure it 
holds for all ages, the New Testament, all penned 
by foreign hands, all filled by thought foreign to 
Greek intellect. 

And we may say that Homer wandered and 
sang the " Ballad of Troy Town," that ^Eschy- 
lus wrought high tragedies, that Demosthenes 
thundered in the Agora, that Socrates questioned 
among his scholars, and Plato taught and thought 
and wrote, that Themistocles and Miltiades 
fought, that Alexander conquered, that Athens 
shone white across the sea, and the Acropolis 
gleamed in pillared splendor, — that all the story 
of Greece, like all the story of Rome, unrolled and 
developed till the time came for the Child in the 
manger ! 

It is a line of thought familiar, no doubt. But 
it bears recalling, for it is reasonable and true. 
In the visions of strange things seen by the 
waters of Ulai, the future unrolls itself to Daniel. 
But that unfoldment is a genuine development ; 
and when the vision becomes history we can read 
the ordered law by which all things moved in 
their sequences till the kingdoms of the ancient 
world had made ready the time for " the eternal 
kingdom of the saints of the Most High." 

So there is a half-truth in the thought of those 



120 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 

who imagine the faith a development. There is 
a half-truth in every falsehood. The divine reli- 
gion has its human side as well as its divine. The 
" treasure," in the largest sense, is "in earthen 
vessels." The environment for Christ and Chris- 
tianity is developed in what we blindly call the 
natural order, but the environment does not make 
Christ. 

I say, "blindly call the natural order." For, to 
one who believes in a living God, that "the Power 
behind phenomena " is present, imminent, with 
will, purpose, judgment, righteousness, and mercy, 
— that, in truth, God rules and reigns among the 
kingdoms of men, and all things move according 
to an all-wise will, from an empire's ruin to a 
sparrow's fall, — the natural is itself the super- 
natural, and the world's secular story is divine. 

The principle gives us the Christian philosophy 
of history, — all things developing the time and 
place for the cradle once, all things since working 
and unfolding for the great day of the King's 
coronation, a redeemed earth and a ransomed 
humanity. 

And so as when the promise was given to man, 
beginning his world-long fight with evil, "The 
woman's seed shall bruise his head," we are still 
the heirs of the future, "the prisoners of hope." 



THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 121 

Still the great splendor gleams afar. Still we 
keep our Advents with our Lents, and look for 
the day of His appearing ; while we turn daily 
to the temptation, the struggle, and the failure of 
the common life. 

For we know not the small nor the great, nor 
whether this from our hands shall grow or that. 
But we do know that the great harvests of God 
are ripening ; that the great year of God, for man 
and the world, is coming ; that all things, day and 
night, develop to a new crisis for a new Seed that 
shall make a new world. 

We are content, in all the dark and doubt, to 
believe as our great Christian poet sings, — 

" In one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves." 

We have seen the Divine seed, root, and germ, 
come in His time, when the time was ripe, — 
come Child in the manger, and grow to master 
the world and men, and give a sense and purpose 
to human life. 

Shall not the long, blind writhing and groping 
of the ages grow into that other day, — always 
rosy on the far-off hills, always palpitating down 
into the dark again, which yet leads us, as it led 
our fathers, — the day when the Babe in the 



122 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 

manger shall be crowned " King of kings and 
Lord of lords " ? 

Yea, for this God worketh hitherto, and man 
worketh. There, too, the Divine and the human 
meet ; and, mystery that it is, the Divine waits 
upon the human, — the seed waits the seed-bed. 

And it is ours to hasten or delay the Day of 
God! 



LECTURE V. 
THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 



"But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall 
smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if 
any man will sue thee at the law, and take azvay thy coat, let him 
have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, 
go with him twain. Give to him that asketh of thee, and from 
him that would bon'ow of thee, turn not thou away. — St. Mat- 
thew's Gospel, v. 39, 40, 41,42. 



LECTURE V. 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 

THREE chapters of the Gospel according to 
St. Matthew consist of what is called " The 
Sermon on the Mount." 

It is the first recorded teaching of our Lord 
at length, after His entrance upon His ministry. 

The circumstances are sufficiently striking. 
"Great multitudes," gathered by the fame of 
His miracles and His strange words, surrounded 
Him; and while these thronged the slope, He 
took his seat upon the mountain-side, and taught 
them. 

He had come to begin a new era, — to found 
the long-expected kingdom of God. His speech 
on this occasion, so carefully preserved, may be 
looked upon as a proclamation, as, in fact, the 
official declaration of the organic law of that 
kingdom as a living power upon the earth. 

The Sermon on the Mount has therefore, very 

naturally, held a unique place among the utter- 

125 



126 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 

ances of the Lord. It has been held to be 
the very heart of Christ's religion as a law of 
life. Men have gone so far as to say that all 
the rest counts for little, so this be left us ; 
that miracles and mysteries — even the Incar- 
nation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascen- 
sion — are- of small consequence, so that men 
live by the Sermon on the Mount ; that so wise 
are its words, so divine are its principles, that 
they are self-evident moral truths which need 
only to be uttered to be accepted, and therefore 
need no support from any supernatural authority. 

Now, we who believe in the Son of God, and 
who therefore accept mystery and miracle as the 
law of His earthly appearing, yield to none in 
our lofty estimate of these words so new and won- 
derful, while so calmly uttered on the Judaean 
hillside. 

In truth, to us the words are so wonderful that 
we are compelled to take them as the words of 
God. They come from beyond. They are the 
rules of living in the eternal kingdom of God 
in heaven. They are as much as men can under- 
stand of the constitution of God's moral uni- 
verse, eternal as God Himself, some shadow of 
His divine nature ; absolute therefore, and neces- 
sary, whether we can understand or not. 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. \2J 

Behind the gentleness and divine reasonable- 
ness of the words, sleep thunders more awful 
than the thunders of Sinai. The law there 
was bare command, outwardly. Here on the 
Mount of the Beatitudes, the law is from within 
the veil. Tables of stone cannot contain it. It 
is a law living and aflame, for hearts and con- 
sciences, dividing joints and marrow, — the law 
that preserves the inmost heavens, the law that, 
outraged, burns and scorches in hell. 

So awful, as well as so beautiful, are the words 
to us, that we hold them to be the words of God. 
We can see no other adequate origin. They tran- 
scend all human experience. They are no out- 
growth of hereditary influence. They deliberately 
contradict, to all appearances, maxims upon which 
society stands, — even maxims held necessary 
for its own preservation. 

All theories of the origin of morals among 
men, builded in smallest degree upon the needs 
of society, upon the survival of the fittest indi- 
vidual or the fittest association of individuals ; 
all theories which have any thing to say of heredi- 
tary impressions growing by generations into 
consideration for others, as well as the theories 
founded on self-interest, or pleasure, or greatest 
good to the greatest number, — are swept away 



128 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 

by these calm words, before which the world has 
stood dazed, and yet strangely moved and influ- 
enced, since they were uttered. 

For we can imagine a morality — an ethical 
code — growing out of human experience and the 
needs of men living in association. Whatever 
we may believe to be its root-origin or its sanc- 
tions, we can imagine it thus growing amid play 
of opposing forces, and the give-and-take of the 
universal struggle, into some definite system, 
better or worse. And the worst moral system 
that ever existed is this much better than the 
moral system spun out of their own theories by 
some of our philosophers : that it does not con- 
demn men for a breach of the law of the uni- 
verse, inasmuch as they care for the blind and 
the lame and the leprous, and thus make the 
unfittest survive, and, with no fear of the law of 
heredity before their eyes, build asylums for the 
orphans of the sickly and improvident, and even 
reformatories for the children of criminals ! 

The point is, that in the Sermon on the Mount 
the ethics are, at first view, destructive of all 
society, — destructive, indeed, of the individual 
himself, — contradictory of every principle on 
which it has been thought by philosophers to 
found a system of morals. 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 29 

So with all its sweetness and beauty, and with 
all the acceptance it has received from believer 
and unbeliever, the Sermon on the Mount has 
stood a stumbling-block. One strange thing here 
also is this : that whereas there was instant pro- 
test made against other utterances of our Lord 
as hard sayings, which no man could receive, here 
there is none. Yet these other hard sayings have 
been explained and accepted, while no man has 
explained and no man accepted the Sermon on 
the Mount. 

Do not imagine I so far mistake myself as to 
think I can explain it. I desire only to say some 
things concerning it which have helped me to rec- 
oncile apparent difficulties, and so help others, — 
set them at least thinking concerning the matter, 
whether they agree with me or not, which is of 
the least possible importance in any case. 

For the fact is to be first noted, that the Ser- 
mon on the Mount has never yet been lived save 
by Him who uttered it. I dare make no omission. 
No apostle, no martyr, no doctor or father, no 
Christian man of any period or of any name, has 
ever utterly lived by the Sermon on the Mount. 

In fact, I may say the Sermon has never been 
proclaimed as a possible code of life at all, except 
by its Author. It seems, in large measure, to 



130 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 

have dropped out of the Christian consciousness 
from the first, if it ever found lodgement there at 
all. Those who have commented upon it or tried 
to explain it have explained it away. They do so 
yet. Hostile critics have declared, that, carried 
out, it would break up human society. Some 
fantastic efforts have been made, at times, to live 
by its declarations, and have failed utterly under 
whatever name. Practical people, living in the 
world, have, whether Christians or not, agreed to 
ignore the existence of a great deal of this won? 
derful speech, or to consider it as, at least, not 
expected to be lived. 

Non-resistance to evil, turning the one cheek 
when the other is smitten ; when robbed of the 
coat, to surrender the cloak ; compelled to do a 
thankless service, to do the double ; to feel bless- 
edness when one is reviled and abused cause- 
lessly, and to love and bless the abuser and the 
reviler, — this is a part of the teaching ; and we 
are told by good Christian men and wise men 
that to act upon this teaching would turn every 
organized human society into anarchy, the Church 
included ; that the world would be uninhabitable 
by any but evil men ; the good would be extin- 
guished from its face, only the swinish and the 
tigerish left. 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 131 

Of course the Lord could not have contemplated 
a result like this, therefore His words must be 
capable of some other explanation than one that 
would involve this. There is evidently, it is vir- 
tually said, some mistake somewhere. Resistance, 
resentment against injury, swift vengeance upon 
the wrong-doer, either by the one injured or soci- 
ety acting for him, is essential to the being of an 
ordered life upon earth ; and our Lord could never 
have contradicted the plain facts of human life 
by laying down propositions destructive as these. 

But the difficulty is not so easily removed. In 
the cases where not the letter, but the spirit, is 
in the mind of the Teacher, He is very plain. There 
seems to be no allegory or parable here. The 
Sermon on the Mount contains plain statements 
concerning conduct, and they all stand upon the 
same footing. " Give to him that asketh thee, 
and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou 
not away," is no more mystical, is uttered in no 
other tone, than " Whosoever shall put away his 
wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth 
her to commit adultery," or, " After this manner 
therefore pray ye." 

It is very dangerous to make distinctions in 
the words of the Lord. He makes none in this 
sermon Himself. All is uttered in the same 



132 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 

unruffled calm of Divine wisdom. No haste, no 
passion, here. Precept and prayer alike stand 
together; and these things are taught, that "ye 
may be perfect, even as your Father which is 
in heaven is perfect." And at the close He con- 
firms all with that beautiful and awful parable of 
the wise man who heard these sayings, and did 
them, and so built, amid the floods and storms, 
his house upon a rock ; and of the foolish man 
who heard, and did not, and so built upon the 
sand, and in the hour of tempest and rising flood 
had the shelter of his life swept away. 

Let us frankly say, then, that no explanation 
which weakens or obscures the words can be a 
true or reverent explanation. It is possible surely 
to find a point of view where they shall retain 
their force, and yet be words possible and hopeful 
for man. 

Remember, then, that all the words of the Lord 
are seed-words. He Himself is the sower who 
went forth to sow. His words are living and life- 
producing germs. They are germs which need to 
grow, which are sown that they may grow. They 
demand an environment, and they demand time. 
Men's words are generally dead formulas. They 
have usually one short meaning, and the utter- 
ance has an end. Sometimes even to men, how- 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY, 1 33 

ever, since they are in the image of God, it 
comes to utter words of power, words that live 
and grow and after many years are vital and 
productive, words whose full meaning only time 
reveals. 

But the Lord's words are such in infinite meas- 
ure. They are not formulas, but the announce- 
ment of principles. They are not words only, but 
things. They have creative power. They are 
germs of spiritual forces. "They are spirit, and 
they are life." We err if we imagine that one age 
understands them or one meaning exhausts them. 
Eternal, vital, and creative, seeds of things, they 
are cast into the seed-bed of the world and time, 
to grow as the world grows, and develop as time 
develops, their full outcome and product only to 
be hoped and dimly guessed afar by men upon 
the earth. " He that hath ears to hear " can 
gather something, however, from the first, though 
the seed grow secretly, and the green blade hath 
not yet burst the brown mould. 

Many words in the Sermon on the Mount, let 
us frankly admit, seem to us impossible. The 
day of their power has not come. We can in a 
degree understand the situation from certain 
other words which when first uttered were as 
strange as these, but which to us now are words 



134 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 

of power, and in their truth self-evident to the 
Christian conscience. 

Shall we confine the idea of a development in 
the kingdom of God only to its outward growth ? 
Shall we say the mustard-seed and tree refer only 
to the visible organization ? Can we say that of 
the parable of the leaven ? 

Or shall we extend the idea to the development 
of doctrine, as a certain class of Roman theolo- 
gians do, and stop there ? 

Is there not also a development in ethics ? Is 
not that rather the development referred to, the 
connection of the words considered, when our 
Lord speaks of " first the blade, then the ear, 
then the full corn in the ear"? Is it not the 
development of spiritual insight and power in 
" the kingdom of God " which " is within you " ? 

"Blessed are the peacemakers." Consider 
where those words were spoken, and to whom. 
Cast out from the great Sower's hand, they fell, 
a seed of life from heaven, upon the prepared 
or unprepared hearts of men. 

And, looking at the men and the time, one 
would say, of all the seeds sown this is least likely 
to find due soil for growth. 

"Nay," said the Roman, "the word has no 
meaning. Blessed are the war-makers, rather." 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. I 35 

His whole race-instinct, his hereditary impulse, 
and the universal sentiment of his people, revolted 
against the word. Blessed might he be, indeed, 
who made peace as the result of war, if that 
peace were won even by the creation of a desert ; 
but the blessing came not from the peace, but 
from the war that preceded the victory. 

The most blessed man in all the world, the 
man who trod the heights of life and time in 
splendor, was the impei'ator returned from victory, 
crowned in his triumphal car, with the spoils of 
conquered provinces behind him, and the captives 
at his chariot - wheels, drawn slowly through 
Rome's shouting millions, up the Sacred Way, 
to the Capitol, in the day of the great triumph. 

"Nay, blessed is the victor! Honor, thanks, 
triumph, to the successful war-makers and con- 
querors of men ! Woe to the vanquished ! Woe 
and sorrow to the weak and the failing ! Happy 
are the strong, and thrice happy he who leads the 
legions to war, and returns for the laurel crown 
and the Senate's and the people's thanks ! " 

Here was the Roman sentiment ; and the 
Lord's words were spoken in the Roman Empire, 
where, after all, that sentiment was predominant. 
But was it not Jewish sentiment as well ? Among 
the Lord's own kin were the war-makers not 



136 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 

blessed, from Joshua the son of Nun, to Judas 
Maccabaeus ? No fiercer soldiers than the sons 
of Jacob ever fought, and no men more ready to 
follow and honor, and count thrice blessed, him 
who should make successful war on Rome, drive 
the legions from the sacred heritage, and set up 
the throne of the warrior David. 

And yet the seed fell and grew. Among 
Romans, as among Jews, it grew. The strange, 
heavenly -sounding word fell gently upon the 
wrathful voices ot a hateful and warring world, 
and the sound was not lost in all the fierce 
discordancy of human strife. 

The years pass on. The seed-word germinates. 
In the dark it grows strong. And now the chil- 
dren of a race more warlike than the Roman at 
its fiercest, the children of the men that con- 
quered Rome and drank the joy of battle as the 
wine of life, these children, no less warlike than 
their fathers, a brigade of whom could scatter 
like chaff the best army ever led by Caesar, these 
children say, "Yea, blessed are the peacemakers. 
They are the children of God." 

The greatest soldier of the century — " the 
great world - victor's victor " — said, " There is 
nothing so dreadful as a great victory, except a 
great defeat." 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 37 » 

And the greatest soldier of our own land said, 
"I never wish again to see even a single regi- 
ment under arms for battle." 

So that seed -word sown upon the mountain- 
side fell into the world's forbidding furrows, and, 
covered by the rough clods of trampled battle- 
fields, germinated even so, and grew. And now 
all Christian men accept it as a truth self-evident, 
an unassailable principle of action, an eternal 
law of the kingdom of God. 

Here is another seed-word of the great Sower: 
" Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exer- 
cise dominion over them, and they that are great 
exercise authority upon them. But it shall not 
be so among you ; but whosoever will be great 
among you, let him be your minister, and whoso- 
ever will be chief among you, let him be your 
servant." 

It is hard for us now fully to understand the 
idea of kingship or sovereignty when these words 
were spoken. It was entirely irresponsible in its 
highest conception. The great Oriental despot- 
isms were governed as if existing for one man's 
pleasure, or one man's glory. Only in Israel, as 
far as we can see, had there been the sense that 
a king was responsible ; and it was a sense only 
kept alive by all the prophets and all the judg- 



I38 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 



ments of God. Otherwise, kingship and author- 
ity were held as private property for the glory 
and grandeur and pleasure of the owner. He 
gratified his insane desire for power, or his brutal 
lust for sensual pleasure, with no sense of respon- 
sibility to the gods or to men. Types surviving 
have come to us in some of the modern rajahs of 
India and in the king of Dahomey. 

The Roman emperors imported the type into 
Europe, and fastened it upon the prostrate Repub- 
lic. The emperor lived, and pursued his pleasure, 
gratified his brutal or his bloody lusts, and con- 
sidered that he was there to do so, that this 
was the purpose and meaning of his supreme 
authority. He sat upon the world's high 
places, with abject millions under his feet, 
that he might by their means pursue his own 
delights, and have his brutal will in spite of 
gods and men. 

A frightful portent on the earth, this diabolic 
perversion of the Divine idea of leadership and 
masterhood ; and yet it lies in murky red, as of 
the pit of hell, upon the pages of all history, and 
men were content to have it so. There was no 
other theory held in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we 
may say, when the Lord spoke. 

And here is a strange word to fall into such a 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 39 

world. Who could receive it ? It must lie for 
centuries slowly germinating in a world red by 
wars, darkened by tyrannies, groaning under 
cruelty, or dumb with despair, under the brutes 
that trampled its millions down. Who of all 
that heard that word could have received it as 
the law of man's government, because it is the 
eternal law of God's ? 

Society, as men then understood it, would be 
broken up in the attempt to rule on such princi- 
ple. Even the apostles themselves had no under- 
standing of the principle. They, too, dreamed of 
thrones and dominions for their own aggrandize- 
ment in the very kingdom of heaven. High- 
seated, with feet upon the necks of prostrate 
men, — this was, up to this moment, their notion 
of the high places Christ promised. Not till He 
died that men might live, not till the cross be- 
came his throne, and the crown of thorns his 
diadem, and his own blood his coronation purple, 
did they understand the infinite sweep of that 
law so passionlessly uttered by the Master. And 
it has been a hard thing to learn. All things 
were against it. The existing state of things 
gave no welcome to the germ-thought, nor 
would any existing state of things for ages to 
come. The seed was buried out of sight and 



140 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY, 

out of knowledge, among civilized and barbarian, 
Christian and heathen, equally. 

But divine germs do nojt die. In due time the 
tiny shoot breaks the stained and trampled sod. 
It grows in storms, roots itself in a rocking world. 
And to-day, after eighteen hundred years, all 
Christian men acknowledge that the Lord in that 
utterance laid down the fundamental organic law 
of human society. 

Authority exists not for the benefit of him who 
exercises it, but for the benefit of those upon 
whom it is exercised. The high place is no pri- 
vate possession. It exists that high service may 
be done. Its height is a vantage from which to 
work for those below. Only by the work done 
does any man hold title to the place. Excep- 
tional in power, genius, leadership, foresight, he 
is sternly held to strict accountability. Under 
penalties, he must not use these great gifts for his 
own glory or his own pleasure. They are trusts 
to be used in human service. And the man most 
wonderfully endowed, and sitting on the necks of 
kings, as our own century has given us instance, 
is hurled from his high place and swept from all 
his greatness by an indignant human sentiment 
when he uses the great gifts and the great place 
for his own service and not the service of men. 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 141 

So has that little seed-word dropped in Palestine 
grown, that it is a self-evident statement of fun- 
damental truth. Our civilization stands upon it, 
all our constitutions, all the order of our settled 
government, all our political freedom. 

Whether in our own Republic or in the consti- 
tutional sovereignty of the mother-land, whether 
it be president, king, queen, or emperor, whatso- 
ever the form, the law lies below the same, — 
" Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be 
your servant." 

Our own chief magistrate puts the principle in 
political phrase, but the same principle neverthe- 
less, — "Public office is a public trust." And 
the greatest emperor of the age lies under the 
rain of his people's tears, his long life one un- 
broken witness to the principle that he and his 
were to wear the crown because no man in Ger- 
many toiled as the emperor toiled, and that day 
and night, from youth to ninety years, he was the 
servant of his people, and therefore their greatest. 
So we find some germs of the Master-Sower have 
grown. 

Shall we despair of others of which we see no 
movement yet, no stirrings in the dark furrows of 
the world ? Shall we say, because they have not 
shown green above the clods yet, that they are 



142 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 

not living seeds at all, or that the Lord's action is 
misunderstood, and He did not sow them? 

I prefer to believe we have here examples of 
the condition and of the law of growth. The 
time is not ripe. But the seed is not dead. 
"The word of the Lord endureth forever." "In 
the heavens " at least it liveth, and the heavenly- 
germs sown on earth have that eternal life, and 
wait their resurrection. 

" I say unto you, that ye resist not evil." 
" Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, 
turn to him the other also." 

They are hard sayings, we confess. Who can 
hear them ? But they are no harder sayings to us 
than other sayings, in whose divine light and 
gentle human truth we now delight ourselves, 
once were to our fathers. 

I think, even now, one can see some stirrings 
in the dead dust that covers them. The world 
grows a gentler rule. Revenge has taken up its 
dwelling among savages and half-savages. There 
is consideration for the meek, there is room in a 
selfish world for the poor in spirit, for the un- 
aggressive, the non-resisting, the weak. 

The cry of " Vae victis / is heard on no battle- 
field longer : nations take no vengeance. The 
conquered are lifted from among the trampling 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 43 

horse-hoofs, and the red cross of relief is alike 
sacred to contending hosts. 

It is yet a wild, half-savage world, full of 
cruelty and unreason and brutality. But the 
clouds are lifting. I believe no man need fail to 
see the promise of the coming day. More and 
more the kingdom of the Child grows mighty. 
More and more the power of love and gentleness 
reveals itself. More and more revenge and wrath 
and hatred are hiding in the pit whence they 
came ; and more and more pity, forgiveness, gen- 
tleness, and love are seen to be human, as we 
have so long preached them to be divine. 

I can believe the hour is coming when men will 
accept the Lord's law of forgiveness as a self-evi- 
dent spiritual statement, as they have accepted 
others I have named. It surely is the eternal law 
of the kingdom of God, the law on which, to the 
very letter, He Himself lived and died for our 
salvation. Being so, it shall some day surely be 
the visible and universally accepted law for men. 
They may be slow to act upon it, after its ac- 
knowledgment, as they have been slow upon 
others. Deeds will fall far short of professions, 
and many failures will obstruct. But that the 
day will come when the unprovoked wrong-doer 
will be looked upon somewhat as a madman or an 



144 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 

idiot is looked on now, I doubt not ; when men 
will stand shocked and amazed at the smiter upon 
the right cheek, as upon some strange monstrosity 
of human nature, who must be kept in safety, 
examined, pitied, cured, and made human if it be 
possible, I doubt not. The world has seen 
growths as strange as this ! 

For we Christians are still the prisoners of 
hope. God's kingdom rules the future. We wait 
with patience. The kingdom cometh not with 
observation. 

Our hope justifies our attitude. Christ's religion 
has not failed. After eighteen hundred years we 
are not shaken when men tell us " there has 
never yet been a Christian according to Christ's 
measure. No church, sect, or party has ever 
dared to lay down His plain law, and demand lives 
measured by it. And if He Himself should come 
and live, as He lived in Judaea, there is not a 
Christian community in which He would not be 
seized and restrained as an outcast or insane." 

I say we are not shaken, because we see the 
Lord put His kingdom into the world subject to 
what we call natural laws, that is, subject to the 
way of His own order and working in the world. 
So He Himself declares. I have no right in rea- 
son or Scripture to expect it otherwise. The 



THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 145 

growth is slow. Its slowness was foretold. It 
awaits the procession of the years, the words and 
works and thoughts of men. But there is 
growth, development, and I can see them with 
my eyes. " First the blade." It is possibly only 
blade-time yet. Certainly it is not the time of 
the full corn. But the blade is full earnest of the 
bending ears of the harvest. 

And if God can wait, we can wait. Still from 
the lips of His Church will fall the words that 
find no ears that can hear. Still half our preach- 
ing is of things half understood, not believed, 
certainly not lived. Still the voice cries in the 
wilderness, and only its own echo comes back. 

But we have the sure promise of the Master, 
and can confirm our wavering faith by past expe- 
rience, that His Word shall endure forever, and 
that, some day, every utterance of the Eternal 
Word shall stand upon the earth and before the 
eyes of men confessed a living word of power, a 
law of the eternal kingdom of God in heaven 
and in earth alike. 



ftartsf) Hectares 

ON THE 

draper Boofe. 

By WM. A. SNIVELY, D.D. 

260 Pages. 
Cloth Binding 
Price $1.25. 

From the Presiding Bishop, 
Dr. Snively's "Parish Lectures on the Prayer Book" seem to me 
admirably adapted for the purpose for which they were written. They 
are simple, clear and to the point. 

They are certainly an excellent help in that duty which is by canon 
laid upon "ministers of this Church, who have charge of parishes 
or cures," that they be " diligent in informing the youth and others in 
the Doctrine, Constitution, History and Liturgy of the Church."' 

Very truly yours, J. Williams. 

From " The Churchman" 
As these lectures are for parish use, they do not enter upon doubtful 
or disputed topics. They are eminently conservative, but they are well 
guarded from the danger which might easily follow of being common- 
place. 

There is a clearness and directness of style which makes their pres- 
entation of even the most obvious truths regarding the Prayer Book in- 
teresting and felicitous. 

This volume seems to us to be admirably adapted for the use of 
those who are desirous to know more about the Church services than 
mere acquaintanceship with their customary order can give. 

There are many more people than one commonly supposes, who 
would gladly know more about the Prayer Book than they do, and yet 
are diffident about asking. 

We find that Dr. Snively's book fills this important place, and we 
are glad to call our readers' attention to it. 

From "The Brooklyn Daily Eagle" 
"Parish Lectures on the Prayer Book" is one of the most sumptuous 
looking religious publications of the season. It is from the " DeVinne 
Press." 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

Publisher, 



2 and 3 Bible House, 

New York. 



Stbtng Voices 



OF 



Practical Sermons by Bishops and other Clergy of the 
Church, intended for Family and Lay reading. 

256 Pages, i2mo. 
Cloth Binding. 
Price $1.25. 



They are what most of us desire such productions to be — plain, prac- 
tical and brief. — Mail and Express. 

We observe no extravagance or straining for effect, yet in every case 
the tone is devout and practical, and the volume is adapted to do great 
good. — N. Y. Observer. 

There is no need of an extended criticism of this volume, the title 
and table of contents speak for themselves. We are sure that no com- 
mendation of ours is needed to increase the sale of this timely and valua- 
ble collection of sermons. — The Churchman. 

The preface from the graceful pen of Dr. Cushman excites the desire 
to read the sermons, and the desire grows by what it feeds upon. Here 
are sermons by men whom we know and admire, who are eminent in the 
teaching office. It was a happy thought of Mr. Whittaker to publish this 
volume, and we cordially join the hope expressed in the preface that it 
will meet with such a welcome as to justify not only a second, but an an- 
nual volume of like character. — Living Church. 

The whole spirit and purpose of the discourses is the inculcation of 
such practical truths as are of every-day need in this busy, vexing, per- 
verse, distracting world, to uplift, to cheer, to strengthen and to inspire. 
The love of Christ (subjective and objective) is the key-note of the vol- 
ume, and from this come strains that tell us of content, purity, work, hab- 
its, friends, temptations, worldliness, decision, and paradise. — The Critic. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 and 3 Bible House, 



Publisher, 



New York. 

(OVER.) 



3 

Prebendary Row on Eternal Punishment. 



p UTURE RETRIBUTION, 

Viewed in the Light of Reason and Revelation. 
By 

THE REV. C. A. ROW, MA 



Octavo, Cloth binding. Price, $2.50. 



"A very valuable book which will bring out in a very strong 
light to all careful readers, the remarkable discrepancy between the 
reticence of Scripture, and the confidence with which ecclesiasti- 
cal literature has treated the subject. . . . We feel very thank- 
ful to Mr. Row for stating the question plainly, and making its direct 
bearing on our faith in the justice of God, as clear as he does. ,, — 
Spectator. 

" Every reasonable Christian would be a gainer by reading 
this book." — Daily Telegraph. 

" Mr. Row's style and manner is just what it ought to be — 
plain, calm, and dignified, like the great Church of which he is a 
Canon. Such books as this meet a grave want of the day in a 
manner calculated to deepen alike its reverence and its rectitude." 
— Pall Mall Gazette. 

" This is certainly one of the most important contributions 
ever made to the study of Christian Eschatology. ... It has 
a fulness of systematic treatment which belongs to no previous 
treatise on the subject." — Church Bells. 

" An earnest, skilful, and interesting book." — The Critic. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York. 



4 

The Late Bishop of Ely's Sermons. 



Sermons on Subjects from the Old 
Testament. 

Sermons on Subjects from the New 
Testament. 
By JAMES RUSSELL WOODFORD, D.D., 

vSometime Lord Bishop of Ely. 

EDITED BY 

HERBERT MORTIMER LUCKOCK, D. D., 

Author of " After Death," Etc. 

2 Volumes, i2mo, Cloth. Price, $2.50. 

1 4 It is the reality of faith which gives to the words of the preacher their 
living effect, and this reality was one of the ingredients in James Russell 
Woodford's oratorical power. His renown, as a preacher, was not the result 
of place or position. * * * Another qualification which is conspicuous in 
these Sermons is the unpolemical character of his mind. His mode of meeting 
error was by confronting it by positive and dogmatic teaching of the truth. 
He rather left the truth to speak for itself instead of wrangling with an oppo- 
nent. And a third quality, which is essential in a preacher, is that of 
sympathy. This was a marked feature of the character of Dr. Woodford, and 
may be traced in both these volumes. It was a sympathy which arose from 
self- forgetfulness and was not merely the expression of an emotional nature." 
* * * These volumes form a solid contribution to the homiletic literature 
of our Church. — The Literary Churchman. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York. 



s 

TWO WORKS FOR BIBLE 
READERS. 



A Handbook of Biblical Difficulties ; or, Reasonable Solu- 
tions of Perplexing Things in Sacred Scripture. Edited by 
Rev. Robert Tuck, B.A. With ample indexes. 568 pages. 
8vo, cloth, $2.50. 

" This book, we think, will prove very helpful to many minds. 
Ours is a sceptical age. Never before has the Bible had to meet 
so many and such fierce assaults. It has been attacked by the 
critic, the scientist, the historian, and the moralist. Its difficulties 
have been exaggerated and its meanings misrepresented. Objec- 
tions are brought against it everywhere, among the working as 
well as among cultured scholars. And what we need is a fair 
reasonable reply to these objections ; a satisfactory explanation of 
the difficulties which every thoughtful mind encounters in reading 
the Bible. This is furnished us, to a large extent, in the book be- 
fore us. It is the work of a calm, judicious scholar, who seems to 
know just what is required by perplexed minds at the present 
time. It is characterised throughout by good sense, avoiding on 
the one hand the manufacturer of difficulties, and not shrinking, 
on the other, from such as are real." — The Church Press. 

Echoes of Bible History. By W. Pakenham Walsh, D.D., 
Bishop of Ossory. With fifty illustrations. i2mo, cloth, 
$1.50. 

" It is a valuable work, and we do not know where so much 
knowledge can be obtained concerning recent discoveries, in so 
small a compass." — Churchman. 

" Very little that has occurred in the annals of Biblical 
Archaeology during the last half century is here omitted/' — The 
Critic. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York. 



6 



Sermons Preached to Harrow Boys 

In the Years 1885 and 1886. 

By REV. J. E. C. WELLDON, M.A., 

Head Master of Harrow School. 

12mo, Cloth.. Price, $1.50. 

" This is a very interesting and admirable series of Sermons. Mr. Welldon 
seems thoroughly to understand a boy audience. He puts his mind fairly to 
theirs, shows them his own familiarity and sympathy with school life, uses the 
illustrations and relates the anecdotes that will tell best with them. As a rule 
the sermons that will tell with the boys are also very useful for children of larger 
growth. It used to be said of Macaulay that he wrote like a schoolboy, and 
both schoolboys and men are voracious readers of his volumes. It would as 
well that the fathers of the Harrow boys should read these sermons as well as 
the boys themselves. The list of the subjects is singularly attractive, for in- 
deed Mr. Welldon seems extremely well en rapport with the subjects of discus- 
sion that are at present uppermost, and indeed will always be uppermost, less or 
more, to thoughtful minds." — The Literary World, London. 



The Bird's Nest and Other Sermons 

For Children of all Ages. 

By THE REV. SAMUEL COX, D.D* 

Late Editor of " The Expositor." 



lQzm-o., clotli. Price, &1-50- 



" An excellance should be noted as pervading the volume : The absence 
of false sentimentality and the presentation of motives that tend to foster a 
sturdy, thoughtful, earnest Christian life in the boys and girls. Children need 
such motives, and, in fact, they prefer to listen to discourses which make such 
appeals. They are far less easily deceived by clap-traps and tawdry sentiment 
than many older people. For this reason the expository method seems especially 
flitted to interest as well as instruct them. The volume will suggest to many 
pastors the correct view of preaching to children" — The Sunday School Times. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York. 



1 

THE GROWTH OF CHURCH 



INSTITUTIONS. 

By THE REV, EDWIN HATCH, D.D., 

Author of Bampton Lectures on the "Organization of the Early Christian 

Churches." 

i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 

41 Dr. Hatch places himself upon the ground of an original investigator. He borrows little 
from previous explorers ; he treads in the steps of no other student ; he collects facts with un- 
tiring assiduity, and draws his conclusions with bold and serene independence." — The New 
York Independent. 

"We are struck, as we read, by the dispassionateness of the present writer, his aim to be 
not controversial but simply historical being evident on every page." — The Living Church. 

44 It will be read of necessity by every bright divinity student and certainly by every 
thinking clergyman in the United States within the year, and will do more to put our eccles- 
iastical matters upon a secure and sensible footing than any other work of its kind, always 
excepting its precursor in the Bampton Lectures of the same author, that has appeared in 
English during the present century." — The Boston Herald. 



Dr. CheynJs New Work. 



JOB AND SOLOMON, 
Or the Wisdom of the Old Testament. 



By THE REV. T. K. CHEYNE, M.A , D.D., 

Oral Professor of Interpretation at Oxford. Author of 4 ' A Commentary on the 
Prophecies of Isaiah," etc. 

8vo, cloth, $2.25. 

44 Professor Cheyne is one of the leaders in that English school of Biblical Criticism which 
unites with the thoroughness and fearlessness of the Germans, candor, good judgment, and 
reverential spirit peculiarly its own. In the present volumes he treats from the critical stand- 
point the books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus ; and the preface holds out a 
hope, which we trust may be realized, that in a future volume Psalms, Lamentations, and the 
4 Song of Songs' may be similarly discussed. Such books are a boon to educated Christians, 
putting within their reach, in not too abtruse or bulky form, the results of modern scholarship 
and inquiry. If they combat on the one hand, many received traditional notions, they give, 
on the other hand, much more than they take away, imparting fresh interest and value to many 
passages which are in general reverentially ' skipped' as mysteriously obscure, or used as arse- 
nals of texts, to be taken out singly and fearfully misapplied in the service of dogmatic theol- 
ogy. 7 '— Christian Union, 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York. 



8 

Two Books for the Times. 



The Vine Out of Egypt. By Rev. Wm. Wilberforce New- 
ton, Rector of St. Paul's Church, Pittsfield, Mass. 12 mo, 
paper covers. Price, 50 cents. 

The volume is a history of the growth and development of the Episcopal 
Church in America with especial reference to the church life of the future. 
The author gives a history of the movement towards federated unity which 
resulted in the formation of the congress of churches. The last chapter is an 
appeal to the church not to risk i's leadership by the perilous policy of a change 
of name. The volume will undoubtedly create quite an interest among the 
thinkers of the day, and its advent is awaited with eagerness. 

Protestant Episcopal Church Doctrine and Church 
Unity. By the Rev. C. M. Butler, D.D., Late Prof, in 
the Divinity School, West Philadelphia. i6mo, cloth, 60 
cents ; paper, 25 cents. 

From The Church. — "The book is eminently worthy of perusal, and a 
careful perusal, by men of every school of thought in our Church. The author 
brings to the subjects of which he treats a fair and open mind, as well as a 
mind fully instructed in that particular department of ecclesiastical knowledge. 
. . . The question is a most important one always, and a superlatively im- 
portant one just now : What is the position of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church, doctrinally considered, as defined by herself? This question Dr. 
Butler undertakes to answer, gathering his answer from the Prayer Book, from 
its 'Offices' and 'Articles.' What is the position of our Church in her 
teaching concerning the Church Catholic and her own relation to it ; what con- 
cerning the Episcopacy ; what concerning the Sacraments ; and how do all 
these bear upon the subject of Church Unity, now so prominently brought before 
us by the action of the House of Bishops in the late General Convention ? 
These are vital subjects, and in this book are handled in a masterly way, with 
ample knowledge and a strict logical acumen. . . . We would be glad to 
see such a book widely distributed and published in such a form as would make 
its widest distribution feasible. Benjamin Watson." 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York. 



9 

Reduced in Price from %2.oo to $/.oo, net. 



RELIGION; 

A Revelation and a Rule of Life. 

SERMONS AND ESSAYS 

By THE REV. WILLIAM KIRKUS, MA, LL.B. 



i2mo, cloth, uncut, $1.00. Net. 



From The Churchman. — " Mr. Kirkus is so well known not only as an elo. 
quent and stirring preacher, but also as one of our ablest and clearest writers, 
and the present volume thoroughly sustains his well-deserved reputation. The 
reader is so carried on by his glowing, inconventional style, and by a freshness 
of tone and freedom of touch rarely found in sermons, that he is sure to be in- 
terested even if he cannot always agree. . . . Sermons like these ought to 
be in the libraries of every clergyman in the country. " 

From The Christian World, London. — 14 It is a living, thoughtful and 
powerful exhibition of the writer's best intellectual and religious convictions, 
which will be cordially welcomed by his old friends and admirers." 

From The Church Record. — 44 It is refreshing in these days of lcose think- 
ing and careless speaking, when sentimental fancies are substituted on account 
of their novel beauty for the verities of the olden faith, to take up a book so 
strong, vigorous, and scholarly as the one before us. The writer, whose keen, 
critical insight and power of separating the wheat from the chaff, are wtll 
known to thinkers in the Church, has herewith given us a volume that will bear 
reading, and repeated reading, and both furnish abundance of digested thoughts 
and be fruitful in stimulating thoughts in others." 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York. 



RECENT SUCCESSFUL BOOKS. 



Records of an Active Life. By Heman Dyer, D.D. 8vo, 

cloth, beveled, gilt tops, $2.00. 

14 Few men in ecclesiastical life have had better opportunities of knowing 
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powerful." — The N. Y. Observer, 

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"Fact, humor, wit, and strong feeling mark the strong man, and this 
mark is very plain upon every page of the 4 Recent Past.'" — The Church 

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Liturgies and Offices of the Church. For the use of 

English Readers, in Illustration of the Book of Common 
Prayer. By Edward Burbidge, M.A. i2mo, cloth, $2.50. 

Ecclesia Anglicana. A History of the Church of Christ in 
England from the Earliest to the Present Times. By 
Arthur Charles Jennings, M.A. nrao, cloth, red edge, 
$2.25. 

The Gospel and the Age. Sermons on Special Occasions. 
By W. C. Magee, D.D., Lord Bishop of Peterborough. 
Crown octavo, cloth, $2.00. 

The Spirit in Prison, and Other Studies on the Life After 

Death. By E. H. Plumptre, D.D. New and Revised 
Edition, Fifth Thousand. Crown octavo, cloth, $2.00. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York. 



The Theological Educator. 

EDITED BY THE 

REV. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., 

Editor of " The Expositor." 



Under this title will be published a series of Manuals which 
will give a solid and trustworthy grounding in all branches of 
Theological study. It is remarkable that, while such works on lit- 
erature and science abound, the field in Theology is still unoccupied. 

The books will be written by men recognized as authorities 
on their subjects. They will be specially adapted to the needs of 
those preparing for examinations in Theology, as well as for pop- 
ular instruction. 

While the manuals will be specially useful to Theological 
Students, the clearness and simplicity of their style will, it is hoped, 
attract the many laymen interested in these subjects ; while their 
freshness and scholarship will make them interesting even to pro- 
ficients in Theology. 

The price of each Manual will be 75 cents, net ; and will be 
published at short intervals. Early orders solicited for either 
single volumes or the entire set. 



NO W READ Y. 

A Manual of Christian Evidences. By the Rev. Preben- 
dary Row, M.A. 

"It discusses the principal questions involved in a vigorous and popular 
style. It is an admirable compend and worthy of a wide circulation." — The 
Interior, Chicago, 

An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New 

Testament. By the Rev. Prof. B. B. Warfield, D.D. 

" It supplies precisely the hand-book which teachers in this field can place 
in the hands of their students, confident of its accuracy and conformity to the 
latest and best sources of information." — The New Englander. 



I 2 



A Hebrew Grammar. By the Rev. W. H, Lowe, M.A„ Joint- 
Author of " A Commentary on the Psalms," &c, &c; Hebrew 
Lecturer, Christ's College, Cambridge. 

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A Manual of the Book of Common Prayer, showing its 
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Professor at King's College, London. 

A Manual of Church History. In Two Parts. By the Rev. 
A. C. Jennings, M.A., Author of " Ecclesia-Anglicana," 

&c. 

The Apostle's Creed. By the Rev. J. E. Yonge, M.A., late 
Fellow of King's College, Cambridge ; and Assistant Master 
in Eton Coliege. 



IN PREPARATION. 

A Grammar of New Testament Greek. By the Rev. 

William Henry Simcox, M. A., late Fellow of Queen's Col- 
lege, Oxford, &c. 

An Introduction to the Old Testament. By the Rev. C. 

H. H. Wright, D.D., late Bampton Lecturer, &c. 

An Introduction to the New Testament. By the Rev. 

Marcus Dods, D.D. 

The Thirty-Nine Articles. By the Rev. H. C. G. Moule, 
M.A., Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge. 

Preaching. By the Rev. Canon S. Reynolds Hole, M.A. 

A Guide to Theological Literature. By the Rev. Marcus 
Dods, D.D., and the Editor. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York. 



i 



